At this year’s Values Voters Summit Mitt Romney is speaking right before noted anti-gay, ant-bear activist Bryan Fischer — who said recently that Mormons shouldn’t have First Amendment rights.
Romney is scheduled to speak on Saturday, October 8 at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., a social conservative conference sponsored by groups like the Family Research Council, the American Family Association and the Heritage Foundation. Romney is speaking immediately before the “Director Of Issues Analysis” for the American Family Association, Bryan Fischer.
As regular TPM readers will know, Fischer has a long and colorful history of making inflammatory, hateful and occasionally just plain bizarre remarks on his radio show, and in his columns on the AFA site. Despite this, Fischer’s radio show basically became the 2012 version of Before They Were Rock Stars (and, in some cases, Where Are They Now?) for Republicans thinking about running. Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee, Haley Barbour, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich all made appearances on Fischer’s show earlier this year.
So it’s not really surprising that Romney, who was also at VVS last year, is sharing a stage with Fischer. But it is more than a little awkward that Bryan Fischer argued this week that the Founding Fathers really didn’t intend for the First Amendment to apply to Mormons.
“My argument all along has been that the purpose of the First Amendment is to protect the free exercise of the Christian religion,” he said.
“Mormonism is not an orthodox Christian faith. It’s just is not. They have a different Gospel, they have a completely different definition of who Christ is and so forth, I mean, the list could be multiplied endlessly,” Fischer continued. “And it was very clear that the Founding Fathers did not intend to preserve automatically religious liberty for non-Christian faiths, so when Mormonism came along, they practiced polygamy, they believed in polygamy, just like Muslims do today.”
Here’s the video, via Right Wing Watch:
As he says in the video, Fischer also believes that Muslims have no First Amendment rights, and has argued that the U.S. should have “no more mosques, period,” because “every single mosque is a potential terror training center or recruitment center for jihad.”
Fischer’s not a particularly big fan of gays and lesbians either. He’s previously written that the U.S. should impose “legal sanctions for homosexual behavior” and claimed that Hitler used gay soldiers because they “basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after.”
But the list of things that Bryan Fischer hates goes on from there, and gets a little strange. He’s said that it’s time for this country to get rid of the “curse” that is the grizzly bear. He’s argued that the Medal of Honor has been “feminized” because “we now award it only for preventing casualties, not for inflicting them.” He’s outraged that Indian-Americans win a lot of spelling bees because it’s an “outrageous display of ethnic favoritism.” And he’s pretty sure that President Obama wants to give the U.S. back to the Native Americans.
h/t Right Wing Watch:
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