Christians a "hate group"
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Christians a 'hate group'
http://forums.speedguide.net/showthread.php?t=64641
By: Mannix Porterfield, Staff September 02, 2001
Quietly, behind the scenes, an assistant attorney general has been, for several
years, teaching police across West Virginia a course in hate crimes.
Even though lawmakers twice in as many years have repulsed efforts to graft
"sexual orientation" into West Virginia's so-called hate crime statute, Paul
Sheridan covers this controversial aspect in his classrooms.
His teaching manual, crafted by former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno partly
with his input, by definition is "aimed at a law enforcement audience."
Much of the manual prepared by President Bill Clinton's attorney general,
already used to indoctrinate an untold number of law enforcement agencies in
this state, has stirred disquiet in the ranks of the West Virginia Family
Foundation, an affiliate of the American Family Association.
Led by Kevin McCoy of Charleston, the state group finds sections of the
curricula especially disturbing and perceives in them a sinister undercurrent.
Ultimately, he suggests, it could be employed to muzzle men of the cloth.
Under "hate group ideology" identification, for instance, it is written,
"Homophobia recently has been added to their agenda."
"There goes 95 percent of West Virginians," McCoy said last week in an
interview.
"I believe, by and large, the majority of West Virginians oppose the
homosexuality of our society, our state. Unless the senior assistant attorney
general would like to give us a different definition of what homophobia means,
my contention is this applies to anybody who has a problem with homosexuality."
The same section identifies some hate-mongers as those who "blame the federal
government, an international Jewish conspiracy or communism for most of this
country's problems."
What disturbs McCoy and people like him most is the next sentence:
"Some groups include apocalyptic Christianity in their ideology and believe we
are in, or approaching, a period of violence and social turmoil which will
precede the Second Coming of Christ."
Unless Reno and Sheridan can show otherwise, McCoy takes this to mean anyone
with a literal interpretation of the Bible, especially in regard to scriptures
on prophecy, is part and parcel of a hate group.
Two pages later in the manual, Reno speaks of "exceptions" to the U.S.
Constitution's free speech guarantees under the First Amendment.
A statement McCoy finds curious reads:
"Words expressing discriminatory animus may serve as evidence of the prohibited
conduct (e.g., to prove reason for failure to promote) or may constitute the
prohibited conduct itself."
McCoy feels this is ominous, "laying the foundation for certain types of speech
that are not politically correct and how they could be possibly perceived to be
not appropriate within the law enforcement community ..."
"If this curricula is continued to be taught to law enforcement in this state,
it will not be long before they roll out the big guns and start cracking the
whip," McCoy says.
Could this mean preachers would be hauled off to the courts to face hate crime
violations?
"What they're waiting for now is to get 'sexual orientation' into West
Virginia's hate crime law," McCoy said.
"Their goal is to get sexual orientation included. Once they do that, this is
laying the foundation for law enforcement to take care of those people that they
consider to be members of the hate group. Churches, pastors, the whole nine
yards.
"I don't think there will be any group left untouched when their agenda is
finally completed."
If that's not the case, he reasons, then why did Reno use as part of her brain
trust the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign, the
Simon Wiesenthal Center, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the
National Association of Attorneys General and National District Attorneys
Association?
Yet another paragraph in the Reno curricula states, "Organized hate groups focus
on issues of concern to middle America as a method for cloaking and marketing
their hate philosophy (i.e., "government interference, cheating.")
Under motivation, the manual says hate crime offenders feel led by "a higher
order," and, in parenthesis as examples, God is grouped with Adolf Hitler and
the Imperial Wizard.
"Has a sense of urgency about his/her mission; believes he/she must act before
it is too late," the manual says of those who commit hate crimes.
Re-ordering America?
McCoy says "hate crime" legislation is a public relations effort to mask the
hidden agenda of homosexuals - a re-shaping of America to make their lifestyle
acceptable.
"The hate crime law is being used across the country by homosexual activists,"
he said.
"The reason they're doing it is they want to be able to use hate crime laws as a
club against anyone that opposes their radical agenda, which is really
re-ordering a society into the fashion that they desire to re-order it.
"And this is what the curricula is doing - laying the foundation to be able to
accept that agenda."
The West Virginia Hate Crime Task Force, the vehicle through which Sheridan
conducts his workshops, distributes a red, white and gray brochure that states,
"Hate crimes may be committed because of race, religion, sexual orientation,
disability, ethnicity or sex."
It also says such offenses "usually" involve violence, intimidation or vandalism
because the targeted victim is "different."
Fragmented newspaper headlines appear in the brochure as subliminals, and the
phrase "neo-Nazi" is prominent.
To conservative groups such as McCoy's, cleverly linking Nazis and Klan groups
or others backgrounded in violence with opponents of homosexuality is an old
tack harking back to the "big lie" method of the Third Reich.
In this year's legislative session, McCoy said, a group of children from a
Charleston-area church paid a visit to a senator's office to voice opposition to
SB23, the hate crime measure which easily cleared the upper chamber before it
died in a House committee.
McCoy described a scene that followed as one that left a pastor and some young
members of his flock in disbelief.
"He (the senator) ran them out of his office, and said, 'you're a bunch of
Nazis,'" McCoy said.
"We're not Nazis, we're Christians," the children protested.
"Then your whole church is Nazis," the senator shot back.
McCoy said the lumping of hate crime law opponents with Nazis and Klan groups is
advocated by homosexuals in a book, "The Overhauling of Straight America."
"It is evident that our elected representatives are falling into the militant
homosexual propaganda campaign by linking homosexual opponents to Nazis and the
KKK," he said.
Domestic terrorism?
Another catch phrase which has crept into the vocabulary of hate crime law
advocates is "domestic terrorism."
An 8-hour course, billboarded on the West Virginia State Police Academy, is
titled simply "Domestic Terrorism," and topics advertised are "philosophies of
hate and anti-government groups," and threats such people pose.
Again, groups such as McCoy perceive this as propaganda attempting to link any
opponents of homosexuality, including those who use biblical teachings as their
guide, as "terrorists."
In reality, McCoy says figures provided by police and homosexual groups
themselves show the threat of violence among homosexuals is 50,000 times greater
than the threat of hate crimes caused by those outside their ranks.
FBI figures disclosed this year revealed only 1,317 "hate crime" episodes
nationwide inspired by opposition to homosexual behavior, he said.
"Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence that homosexuality is a deadly
lifestyle, and despite the fact that a majority of West Virginians oppose
special protection for this chosen behavior, we have our own attorney general
and the West Virginia Human Rights Commission propagating this big lie that
homosexuals are targeted for violence and deserving of the protected status,"
McCoy said.
"On both sides of the House, there is a trend with legislators becoming more and
more sympathetic to the homosexual agenda as well."
So what is domestic terrorism?
McCoy feels the phrase leaves little doubt where Reno and those swept up in the
hate crime movement want to take America.
"If you follow Janet Reno's curricula, it probably would be those that follow in
the 'hate group ideology,' such as apocalyptic Christians and homophobes."
McCoy is vowing an all-out campaign to counter the seminars and the attempt by
some legislators to embrace the homosexual lifestyle in the protection of the
hate crime umbrella, officially section 6-6-21 of the State Code.
To accomplish its goal, the Family Foundation plans an intense networking with
members of Congress, along with state and local authorities in West Virginia.
"It might be impossible to reverse," McCoy acknowledged, "but we can try to slow
it down."