5 Top Contenders for Conservative Christian Hater of the Year

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http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/missing-fred-phelps-five-top-contenders-christian-hater-year



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1. Timothy Dolan. As president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, is a mainstream faith leader with access to the White House and press that most paid lobbyists can only dream of. Nonetheless, he regularly says and does thing that trigger backlash against the Church because of his blindered focus on obstructing legal rights for women, queers, and child sex abuse victims. After playing several questionable role in the priest sex abuse scandal ( coverups; moving funds), Dolan successfully prevented New York victims from reforming statutes of limitations and so obtaining more time to seek redress after reaching age 18. After fighting victims rights groups in court and the legislature, Dolan said, with a straight face that we must oppose gay marriage because “our children deserve better.”

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2. Scott Lively. If he doesn’t win the Massachusetts governor’s mansion this fall, Lively can at least console himself that he has made his mark on the world by helping to ensure that Ugandan gays get what they deserve: life in prison. When Obama expressed regret at the Ugandan law, Lively had this to say: “I think Obama may as well be a homosexual himself. He is certainly a radical homosexualist—meaning a person, whether they are homosexual or not, who is 100 percent invested in the homosexual agenda ... Anyone who is trying to break down the protections for the natural family and legitimize sexual perversion is complicit in the recruitment of children.” To Lively’s mind, marriage equality leads to pedophilia. He has accused gays of a “Marxist plot” to destroy civilization, a global “Satanic conspiracy” that needs a “revolution” of opponents to keep gays from “ homosexualizing the whole world.” In his effort to fight the gay scourge, Lively once got in trouble for hiring a convicted sex offender.

3. Paul Cameron. Evangelical psychologist Paul Cameron has spent the last 20 years producing shoddy research aimed at showing that homosexuality leads to health and mental health problems and early death. And criminal tendencies. His work is disseminated by the Family Research Institute, a Colorado Springs organization he founded that is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBT hate group. In 1999, Rolling Stone reporter Robert Dreyfuss quoted Cameron as saying that homosexual sex is more pleasurable than heterosexual sex — and without active opposition it would rapidly come to predominate. In January, when the conservative Christian editor of World Magazine, Marvin Olasky, questioned the effectiveness of Uganda’s “kill the gays” bill, Cameron jumped into the fray, likening homosexuality to murder — or worse — which made the Ugandan law perfectly reasonable: “Laws against murder are harsh and unlikely to be effective (in completely stopping murder). But such laws educate as to what is ‘correct’ and serve as a disincentive to commit murder.”

4. Mark Driscoll. A Calvinist superstar with congregations in five states and a dubious moral compass, Driscoll rouses his flock of 14,000 with titillating talk and tight jeans. Driscoll has said enough weird and bigoted things to establish his anti-gay bona fides. Consider: “Masturbation can be a form of homosexuality because it is a sexual act that does not involve a woman... particularly if he’s watching himself in a mirror and being turned on by his own male body.” But it's Driscoll’s comments about females that get him the most powerful Phelps effect. When mega-church minister Ted Haggard, who was then head of the National Association of Evangelicals, got caught with meth and a male prostitute, Driscoll fingered Haggard’s wife: “It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness.”