Christian conservative group American
Family Association's (AFA) Bryan Fischer has likened lifting the
policy that bans gay troops from serving openly to Hitler's army of
“savage gay Nazis.”
Fischer's comments come as both
houses of Congress prepare to take key votes on repealing the policy
known as “Don't Ask, Don't Tell.”
Fischer told his radio audience
Wednesday that Hitler was gay and specifically recruited gay soldiers
to carry out his most vicious attacks because straight men were not
brutal enough.
“Homosexual soldiers basically had no
limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on
whomever Hitler sent them after,” he said. “So he surrounded
himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were
male homosexuals.”
Fischer's commentary has been pulled
straight from the pages of controversial anti-gay author Scott
Lively's The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party.
In the book, Lively asserts that gays,
particularly men, played a key role in elevating the Nazi Party in
Germany. He also links the modern gay rights move to events that
took place in Nazi Germany in an effort to solidify his claim that
gay rights are “dangerous.”
“[T]he 'gay' movement I have seen and
investigated is neither benign, nor are its members 'victims'. It is
vicious, deceptive and enormously powerful. Its philosophy is
Machiavellian and its tactics are (literally) Hitlerian,” Lively
wrote.
Lively, the founder of Abiding Truth
Ministries, a group listed as a hate group by The Southern Poverty
Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks such groups, also
recently came under fire for supporting an
anti-gay bill that included a death penalty in Uganda.
Writing at TPM.com,
Zachary Roth disputes the claim that Hitler was gay: “There's
little hard evidence that Hitler himself was gay. … The iota of
truth behind Fischer's view is that several leaders of the SA – the
tightly organized band of street brawlers that helped Hitler rise to
power – were gay. That included Ernst Rohm, the unit's founder and
leader.”
Roth goes on to explain that Hitler had
Rohm executed in 1934 and the SA's power plummeted soon after.