MEDIA MATTERS – Fox’s Starnes Can’t Stop Defending Anti-Gay Hate Group

Selected Article Excerpts: 

• Fox News Radio reporter Todd Starnes continued to shill for the extremist American Family Association (AFA), allowing the anti-gay hate group to bill itself as “a mainstream, evangelical, pro-family group” and baselessly asserting that the military is waging a campaign of “retribution and reprisals” against conservative soldiers who support the AFA.

• Starnes’ service as a dutiful mouthpiece for anti-gay hate groups defines his journalistic career, so it’s not surprising that he allowed Wildmon’s sugarcoating of the AFA to go unchallenged. Had Starnes actually detailed the rhetoric and ideas conveyed by AFA leaders, his readers might have doubted Wildmon’s claim that he and his “mainstream” AFA colleagues “don’t hate anyone.”The AFA’s Bryan Fischer has called for an “Underground Railroad” to “deliver innocent children from same-sex parents, labeled gay sex as “a form of domestic terrorism,” and linked homosexuality to pedophilia. In designating the AFA as a hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) noted, “The AFA has declared that’homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler … the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.’ ” In his column, Starnes simply wrote off the SPLC as “an organization with a dubious past,” but his own news organization has cited the SPLC’s work on domestic extremists as recently as August.

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