Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah devotes his June 21 WorldNetDaily column to complaining that people are waiting for all the evidence to come in on the Orlando massacre and aren't rushing to solely blame Muslims for it. Farah rants:
I’ve never seen one Big Media story suggesting that Christians should not be coerced into celebrating what they consider to be sinful behavior. Apparently, that’s not a “complicated” or “nuanced” matter at all.
To its credit, the NBC story does point out: “No fewer than 40 out of 57 Muslim-majority countries or territories have laws that criminalize homosexuality, prescribing punishments ranging from fines and short jail sentences to whippings.”
Is there even one Jewish or Christian country in the world that does this?
No. The story left out that little factoid.
Farah is wrong -- numerous Christian countries have legal punishments for being gay. And if he read his own website, he would know that.
Farah's friend, virulently anti-gay activist Scott Lively, reportedly influenced the good Christian people of Uganda -- a Christian-dominated country where homosexuality is already illegal -- to propose a law that would punish it further, even permitting the death penalty for homosexuality. WNBD has given Lively a platform to smear gays as "murderers" who have "fixed their malevolent gaze on Christian Uganda." Is it any wonder that Ugandan officials wanted the death penalty for gays after hearing such rhetoric? And that's just what Lively has said in public; we don't know viciously he has slandered gays in Uganda behind closed doors, though he's facing a lawsuit for his role in helping to incite violence against gays there.
WND has tried to distance Lively from his Uganda work, giving him an unchallenged platform to assert that he had no influence on Uganda officials whatsoever and merely urged Uganda "to become the first government in the world to develop a state-sponsored recovery system for homosexuality on the model we have in the United States for alcoholism," since he (dubiously) believes that homosexuality is "a treatable behavioral disorder."
WND also gave space for Lively to endorse a less severe anti-gay law in Uganda, who was not terribly botheredby the fact that it "retains jail terms for offenders" and stating that the U.S. should "criminalize" homosexuality in order to "prevent sex activists from advocating their lifestyles to children in the public schools or to flaunt their sins in 'pride' parades through the city streets."
Meanwhile, a commenter on Farah's column had his own way of calling out Farah's falsehood:
Why yes, glad you asked. Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Russia, Belize, Guyana, 9 Caribbean countries. Many states in the U.S. until 2003. Ireland until 1993. Germany until 1969. UK until 1967. Christian adherents have never, to put it politely, been in the forefront of decriminalizing homosexuality in any country.
Remember, Farah is weirdly proud of the fact that his website publishes misinformation, so don't expect him to issue a correction anytime soon.
