Bryan Fischer, the anti-gay host of the
AFA's Focal Point radio show, is out to push Mitt Romney as
far right as he and his supporters can, columnist Jane Mayer has
said.
Fischer, whose rants have made him a
darling among conservatives, is the subject of a Mayer profile titled
Bully
Pulpit in the current issue of the New Yorker.
It's not a flattering picture she
paints, either, which led Fischer to call the 10-page story “a
piece of tripe.”
“This is it. I am never ever gonna
cooperate with an organ of the mainstream media for a profile on me
ever again.” (The video is embedded in the right panel of this
page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)
But while Fischer criticized Mayer for
being “unprofessional,” he didn't refute many of the facts in the
profile.
Mayer quotes Fischer blaming gays for
“six million dead Jews” since “homosexuality gave us Adolf
Hitler,” saying, “I've never met an ex-black, but I've met a lot
of ex-gays,” and calling HIV, the virus which causes AIDS, as a
“harmless passenger virus.”
She also reported that Fischer, who
recently said that gay people are incapable of sustaining lasting
relationships, comes from a broken home.
“Fischer didn't volunteer anything
about his mother, but, when pressed, said, 'My parents divorced when
I was about twenty. It just rocked my world.' His mother, who
worked as an interior decorator at a furniture store, was
'chronically late,' and the bus driver on her route to work would
always hold the bus for her. Eventually, he said, 'my mom fell for
the bus driver,' deserting him, his father, and his younger sister.
'I don't want to go into it,' Fischer said. 'But I saw the
devastating impact it had on other people in my immediate family.'
Asked how his father fared, Fischer turned away, then said, 'He
looked like an Auschwitz survivor. It was akin to that ordeal.'”
Appearing on NPR's Fresh
Air, Mayer said Fischer and his supporters are out to push
Romney as far to the right as they can.
“[Fischer's] history – if you take
a look at it, he's an angry voice,” she said. “He is only
backing Romney, with – as he describes it – a 'clothespin on his
nose.' He represents the farthest edge of the evangelical Christian
right and they are not comfortable with Romney, but they have a
marriage of convenience and they're going to back him and push Romney
as far to the right as they can."
The Wall Street Journal
nominated Mayer twice for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.