UPDATE: I have included an addendum at the bottom of this post that gives a rundown of the extreme views expressed — through their statements and writings — by Byan Fischer and David Lane.

Perhaps Republican National Committee Chairman Reince
Priebus should be put on suicide watch. After winning re-election to the GOP’s
top post by a 166-2 margin two weeks ago, maybe Priebus is having second thoughts about
another term.

The turmoil within the RNC about far-right figures
tainting the Republican brand just multiplied as it was revealed this week that
an impending expenses-paid trip to Israel by numerous RNC members was financed by
a group led by an outspoken anti-Semite. Watch for this story to reach the
level of international incident as Jewish groups express their outrage.

The man at the center of the controversy is Bryan
Fischer, a spokesman for a Religious Right organization who is so filled with racist
vitriol that he makes the Republican Party’s other headache, RNC Committeeman
Dave Agema, look like a wacko wannabe.

The story is this: Priebus announced in November that a
free, 8-day trip to Israel was being offered to the 168 RNC members courtesy of
the American Family Association. The affiliation with the AFA, which has been
labeled a “hate group” by one civil rights organization, didn’t seem to faze
the party’s elite. About 60 of them jumped on board.

But with the Saturday departure approaching, some of the
outlandish statements by the AFA’s longtime spokesman, Fischer, about Jews,
blacks and gays have come to the forefront. One of the leading newspapers in
Israel, reported on the RNC trip Wednesday and its ties to the AFA and Fischer.

This quote from Fischer, which reflects views he has
espoused for years, will certainly grab the attention of Israeli and American
Jews:

“The members of these counterfeit (non-Christian)
religions have no First Amendment right to practice their religious faith in
America.”

So, a man who calls for the United States to become a
Christian-only nation and who does not consider Judaism to be a legitimate
faith is arranging for a trip by a bunch of Christian Republicans to Israel.
What could go wrong?

Well, Fischer has become the first casualty of this
budding controversy, as I will explain.

Conservative Republicans may try to brush aside this
story as the product of liberal instigators. They may claim that the hate-group
label pinned on the AFA by the Southern Poverty Law Center is a left-wing tactic.

But here’s the turning point in this tale: Fischer, the
spokesman and director of issue analysis for the AFA, was suddenly, quietly,
amazingly fired by the group Tuesday night in advance of the Haaretz article.
The president of the association told MSNBC that the dismissal was based on
Fischer comments that claimed Hitler’s most brutal Nazi troops were gay men.

Fischer on his radio show

But that explanation doesn’t add up because Fischer has
claimed many times over many years that Hitler chose homosexuals for his elite
SS troops because of their ingrained “savagery and brutality.” He has also
frequently blamed the Holocaust on gays, not Germans.

In fact, the AFA has long tolerated Fischer’s
hate-mongering comments on a wide array of groups:  Blacks, Jews, Hispanics, gays, Muslims, LGBT
activists and Native Americans.

In addition, the AFA has removed Fischer from his
executive post but he will be allowed to continue his talk-radio show that airs
on about 200 AFA-affiliated religious stations across the nation, thanks to the
Mississippi-based group’s $20 million annual budget.

 

While the RNC and Michigan GOP try to work up the courage
to oust Agema, the state’s RNC committeeman, for his homophobic and racist
statements and online posts, and as Priebus braces for the blowback from the
AFA-financed trip, the taint that these right-wingers bring to all they touch
spreads beyond the RNC to some of the likely Republican presidential candidates
for 2016.

According to websites that keep close tabs on the far right,  Rick
Perry, Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul have all established
connections with the AFA or its in-house affiliate, the American Renewal
Project.

David Lane

The ARP is led by David Lane, an under-the-radar
strategist for the Religious Right who, like Fischer, wants to establish
the United States as a strictly Christian nation based on a Christian culture that permeates all of American society. The
primary organizer of the RNC trip to Israel, Lane is known for spewing hateful
rhetoric about gays.

But, unlike Fischer, he was reportedly involved in
supporting GOP candidates for office in 2014 and his newest project, as
reported by The Washington Examiner, is to recruit an “army” of 1,000
fundamentalist pastors to “save America” from same-sex marriage and gay rights by
running as Republican candidates for public office in 2016.

Known as a shadowy “evangelical kingmaker,” Lane organized a closed-door lunch with Sens. Paul and Cruz  last year to address evangelical pastors in
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, according to the SLPC. Last
August, Louisiana Gov. Jindal appeared alongside former Arkansas Gov. Huckabee to
meet with conservative pastors at an August 2014 Iowa Renewal Project event.

Perry prayer rally

Another bizarre aspect of the back story
here is the link between Perry and Jindal and the Fischer/Lane crowd.

Lane played a key role in organizing Gov. Perry’s
“The Response” prayer rally in 2011 — an event held at a Houston stadium and paid
for by AFA — that led to the rollout of his 2012 presidential campaign.

Jindal prayer rally

Last
weekend, Gov. Jindal took an identical approach, with a big “Response” prayer
rally at Louisiana State University, again arranged by the AFA-affiliated folks,
in anticipation of his presidential campaign kickoff.

One of the hard-line evangelical figures
who was associated with the Perry rally and who filmed a selfie video promoting
the Jindal rally was the self-proclaimed “prophetess” Cindy Jacobs. Jacobs has
claimed that she has the power to raise children from the dead and to foresee
terrorist attacks. When a mysterious die-off of blackbirds occurred in
Arkansas, Jacobs told her flock that it was a divine message to America
resulting from the repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell policy.

 

Cindy Jacobs

The association between this crew and GOP presidential
candidates is one thing, but the fact that they attempt to carry out this
association under the radar is another. On the day before the Jindal rally,
when MSNBC began reporting on Jacobs’ beliefs, the organizers of the event
quickly removed her video from their website.

Similarly, Fischer was fired very quietly when the Jewish
press got wind of the AFA’s background and core beliefs.

The AFA’s response to criticism of the trip over the past
24 hours was, well, horrendous.

Sandy Rios, the association’s director of governmental
affairs, said that the AFA considers Israel a solid American ally despite the country’s
“secular government” and though the association is not “fond of atheist Jews”
who live there.

 

While Jews of all stripes await a response from the RNC,
here is how the SLPC summed up the situation in a letter to Priebus authored by
Richard Cohen, the law
center’s president:

 

“Given that the disease
of anti-Semitism is flaring throughout the world, we certainly understand your
desire to show your commitment to Israel at this time. But accepting funding
from an extremist group like the AFA would make a mockery of that commitment
and legitimize its extremism.”
*****

Here are (after scanning various websites) some of the greatest hits from Byan Fischer and David Lane:

 

·         Since taking his post at the American Families Association in 2009, Fischer has often said that gay people are “the single greatest perpetrators of hate crimes on the planet, outside the Muslim religion.”  He has also referred to the LGBT community as the leading perpetrators of hate crimes and “sexual deviants” who have between 300 and 1,000 sexual partners in a lifetime.
·         In Fischer’s references to Islam as a “counterfeit” religion that should be barred in the U.S., last year he added this: “Islam is like the Ebola virus; it’s deadly, it’s lethal.” He has also made assertions that inbreeding may have affected Muslim intelligence and sanity.
·         Fischer, a former preacher, has asserted that America’s welfare costs are a problem because of immorality in the black community. “Welfare has destroyed the African-American family by telling young black women that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and obsolete,” he wrote in 2011. “… We have incentivized fornication rather than marriage, and it’s no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits.”
·         Lane has stated plainly the need for Christian “martyrdom” in a war to save America: “Let’s make it crystal clear: Those who embrace homosexual marriage and homosexual Scouting – or homosexuality in general – know little and practice nothing of Christianity.”
·         In a 2012 Op-Ed piece, Lane wrote that Christians need to be “retrained to war for the soul of America, and quit believing the fabricated whopper of the ‘Separation of Church and State…” An evangelical, he also hinted that fellow Christians must block same-sex marriage because “America’s survival is at stake, and this is not tall talk or exaggeration.” The piece was so inflammatory that the ultraconservative news outlet World Net Daily removed it from its website.
·         Fischer said on Thursday that criticism of the RNC trip to Israel was coming from “Big Gay” – a special interest bloc similar to Big Business or Big Labor. On his Wednesday radio show he tried to clarify remarks from two days earlier in which he ainsisted that gay activists are driven by “the unvarnished energy of Satan himself.” Insisting that his liberal critics “cherry-pick” quotes from him, which are then presented out of context, Fischer explained that gay activists are actually victims who have been captured by Satan and become his prisoners to do his bidding. “They are actually captives,” he said. “Prisoners of war, if you will, of the real ultimate enemy that we are contending with.”
·         In 2011, Fischer, 62, said that Native Americans are not Christians and therefore it’s their own fault that they lost their land and were forced onto reservations where they cope with terrible living conditions. “Superstition, savagery and sexual immorality” disqualified Native Americans from “sovereign control of American soil,” Fischer claimed. Poverty and alcoholism on Indian reservations, he added, can be blamed on Native Americans themselves, because they “continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition” and refuse to come into “the light of Christianity”
·         Lane, 59, said he is recuiting 1,000 evangelical pastors to run for office s Republicans in 2016 as “part of a spiritual battle. If we are going to survive as a nation, we have to have a spiritual resurrection,” In his zeal for a Christian-only nation, Lane said, “I’m getting an army marching.” He explained in a separate interview that the Religious Right will take control “by laying down the law on Christian principles and Christian values.”
·         Back in early 2009, when Fischer led the Idaho Values Alliance, he celebrated a plane crash that killed 14 people because he believed it was God’s work, a divine message to end abortion. “You by now will have read about the plane crash in Montana which took the lives of 14 people,” he said at the time. “What you may not have read is that among the victims were members of Bud Feldkamp’s family, including two of his daughters, two sons-in-law, and five grandchildren. Feldkamp, it turns out, is the owner of the nation’s largest privately owned, for-profit abortion chain.”
·         After the 2013 Super Bowl, Fischer said he was certain that Beyonce used her halftime show to discreetly flash Satanic symbols to the huge TV audience watching at home.
·         And Fischer’s attempt at serving as an amateur historian led to this gem: “Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.”

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