Bryan Fischer's abject lunacy: the gift that keeps on giving

Bryan Fischer is not exactly a bundle of warm, friendly feelings towards quite a few of his fellow men. You can find examples of how utterly deranged his public pronouncements on behalf of the American Family Association come off as from sources ranging from the Southern Poverty Law Center to the New Yorker to RationalWiki and beyond, but he may have finally stepped in a very deep pile of his own product when he decided to make a very suspect accusation concerning a very public child abduction case.

I won't go into the full details of the Lisa Miller case myself (the link from the New York Times should suffice), but Fischer may have opened his mouth one too many times for the liking of Miller's ex-partner Janet Jenkins - if she chooses to pursue slander charges, that is. Fischer recently stated on the AFA's Focal Point that Jenkins sexually abused their daughter despite offering up not a shred of real evidence supporting that assertion. This, of course, dovetailed nicely with Fischer's posts on Twitter about how an "underground railroad" needs to be established in order to "deliver innocent children from same sex households", but what was especially galling about all of this is that Fischer actually repeated the unfounded sexual abuse charge as the truth:

[When] the girl came home, she suffered nightmares, she was wetting the bed, she was harming herself, she gave every indication of being sexually molested while she'd been in the company of this lesbian. She told her mom that she had bathed naked with this lesbian person to whom she's not even related, hadn't seen her in like four years and she's taking baths without any clothes on with this lady at five and a half.

So she's coming home clearly very disturbed, agitated emotionally by these visits and the mom said I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to put my child back into that environment. And the Vermont judge says that if you don't submit your child to an abusive environment, it was emotionally abusive, it was sexually abusive and the judge was saying, look if you don't put your child in that environment, I'm going to take your child away from you altogether and I'm going to award sole custody to the lesbian.

That was the plan; in fact the judge ruled you gotta turn her over January 1, 2010, you got to hand her over to this lesbian household where there's a proven record of child abuse.

The problem with this is simple: this "sexual abuse" Fischer is rambling on about is something that Fischer invented out of what amounts to a single paragraph in the Times article:

That January, (Miller) again started blocking visits. She complained, in a court filing and to friends, that Ms. Jenkins had upset Isabella by taking a bath with the child and was undermining the girl’s conservative beliefs by reading her “Heather Has Two Mommies.” When Isabella returned from a rare visit to Vermont showing anxiety and wetting her bed, Ms. Miller blamed Ms. Jenkins.

That's the extent Fischer's "proof" of sexual abuse, apparently; Miller's claim that Isabella "had upset Isabella by taking a bath with her", et al.. But in Fischer's world, this - and the claim by Miller that Isabella then started to show anxiety and wet the bed - serves as ironclad proof that Jenkins sexually abused their daughter when even Miller didn't bother to make that claim in such a fractious custody case. It's almost as if this was the Jerry Sandusky case in reverse; instead of powerful interests instituting a coverup of a serial pedophile's crimes, powerful interests (in the form of Fischer and the AFA) are now accusing the mother of an abducted child of crimes they made up out of thin air because of their vested political interest in the case.

But hey, two can play at that game, right?

One of Fischer's political brethren is James Dobson of Focus On the Family fame. Dobson was responsible for one of the more execrable (and dumbfounding) quotes concerning how a father should ensure that his son will not grow up as one of those damn queers, reproduced below. To wit:

Meanwhile, the boy's father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son's maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.

Now, look, as a former typical male adolescent who had no real trouble fantasizing about the opposite sex as soon as my hormones kicked in and reduced my IQ some 30 points (without any prior weird prompting of "maleness" from dear ol' Dad, no less) the only thing I can say about Dobson's quote is that it comes off as a lot more indicative of downright suspicious behavior than anything Fischer has said about Jenkins. Matter of fact, Dobson's statement could be taken as an indication that he's perhaps just a little too close to playing on the same team with Jerry Sandusky for anyone's liking. But perish forbid I would ever make an unsubstantiated charge like that!