CNN anchor Carol Costello on Tuesday
abruptly ended an interview with Bryan Fischer over his anti-gay
rhetoric.
Fischer, a spokesman for the Christian
conservative American Family Association (AFA), appeared on the
network to discuss the AFA's boycott against the Southern Poverty Law
Center's (SPLC) 11th annual Mix It Up at Lunch Day. The
October 30th event encourages schoolchildren to eat lunch
with someone they normally might not in an attempt to break up social
cliques.
In an e-mail to members, the AFA called
the project “a nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle
in public schools.”
An SPLC representative told The New
York Times that about 200 out of 2,500 participating schools have
decided to opt out of the event since the AFA attacked the program.
“You know it's interesting to me that
they are doing this on October 30, the day before Halloween,”
Fischer said in the CNN segment. “And what this program is, it's
like poison Halloween candy. Somebody takes a candy bar, injects it
with cyanide. The label looks fine, it looks innocuous, it looks
fine. It's not until you internalized it that you realize how toxic
it is. And we want parents to be aware that any program that comes
from the Southern Poverty Law Center is going to be toxic to their
student's moral health.”
Costello questioned whether the AFA's
actions were retribution against the SPLC for labeling it a “hate
group” in 2010, a charge Fischer denied.
After citing a quote from Fischer in
which he claimed that Hitler recruited gay men as Nazi Stormtroopers
to carry out “savage” acts because straight soldiers were not
vicious enough, she said, “That spells agenda to me.”
Fischer asserted that the SPLC was the
“hate group” because they are out to destroy the AFA and the
Family Research Council (FRC).
“They're the ones that want to
silence any [group] that would criticize the normalization of
homosexual behavior. And we know from the CDC and from the FDA, not
part of the vast right-wing conspiracy, that homosexual behavior has
the same health risks associated with ...”
“That's just not true,” Costello
interrupted. “I'm going to end this interview now, sir, because
that's not true. Thanks for sharing your view, I guess?” (The
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