One Million Moms: Intolerance of Biblical Proportions

This post was originally published seven years ago by "The Bilerico Project," which was a leading LGBT website. Considering this week's controversy about the Hallmark Channel pulling an ad with lesbians after caving to "One Million Moms," it's clearly as relevant today as it was then.

I grew up in a small, rural town. One of my first memories as a child was when our babysitter would take us to the tent revivals. That’s where I would see normally upstanding members of the community waving their arms in the air, swaying back and forth, and praying to Jesus for salvation.

As a teenager, I would go to the revivals, but not for salvation. I would go early and watch the people who produced the revivals roll up in their shiny new Cadillacs. Several of them would be seeded in the audience, with arms raised high, waving $50 bills.

One after another, they would do a limbo dance up to the preacher, who would plant his open palms on their foreheads and proclaim them saved and freed from whatever demons had been possessing them. With cries of thanks and salvation, they made sure everyone could see them showering the preacher with cash. Others in the audience would soon follow the pump primers, with cash in their hands, pleading to the preacher to help them stop drinking, cheating, or feeling like crap.

So my interest in religion started early, and not with the usual motivations—which is why I couldn't help but join the conservative Christian organization One Million Moms. Instead of waving large bills and selling salvation, One Million Moms was selling hatred of gays and lesbians.

One Million Moms is a fundamentalist Christian organization. Its goal is to eliminate the presence of gays and lesbians from the public eye. It also targets blasphemy in the media and double entendres about sex. I joined One Million Moms because I wanted to see how a group like this carries out a campaign of intolerance.

Soon after I became a member of One Million Moms, I received a “call to action” by email that implored me to threaten the management of JCPenney with a boycott unless they fired Ellen DeGeneres as their spokesperson. It seems that Ms. DeGeneres has an agenda “that goes against Biblical values.” So I sent an email to JCPenney telling them how impressed I was with their Ellen DeGeneres commercials.

Another call to action was over a single episode of the TV show Person of Interest. According to One Million Moms, the show “went way too far in an attempt to normalize homosexuality when creator and producer J.J. Abrams introduced a married lesbian couple”—a female heart surgeon and her female partner. One Million Moms said, “The show treated this immoral relationship just like any other married couple. This is a way of promoting the homosexual agenda by making it appear absolutely normal.”

So I sent an email to the producers of Person of Interest thanking them for portraying a lesbian couple just like any other married couple. I got their email address from One Million Moms.

In their call to action against Person of Interest, One Million Moms said that except for this one episode, they love watching Person of Interest. They described it as being “fresh, intriguing, and extremely interesting.”

But as my wife pointed out, one of the main characters in Person of Interest was a bad cop named Fusco. Fusco was part of a corrupt group of drug-running police officers. He attempted to execute the main character not once, but twice. By my count, Fusco violated three of the Ten Commandments on many occasions, yet One Million Moms never asked us to boycott the show because of that. Thanks to One Million Moms, I now know that in God’s eyes, being a lesbian is worse than lying, stealing, and murder.

And then there was the TV show Suits, where One Million Moms said, “The name of Jesus is blasphemed and hauled through the sewer constantly. God is never glorified when his Son’s name is taken in vain. You and I cannot let this continue.” Suits was one of the few TV shows I watched. I assumed if God were really angry about it, He would have seen to it that Suits got canceled after its first season. After all, He is God.

I experienced a moment of personal darkness when One Million Moms released a call to action, claiming that the Geico Pig was tempting America’s daughters to have sex with barnyard animals. Taking One Million Moms at their word, I asked my teenage daughter if the Geico Pig commercials were causing her to have impure thoughts about pigs. “Jesus Christ, dad, that’s sick! Where did you get such a twisted idea?”

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Then, One Million Moms threatened Oreo cookies. It seems that Kraft Foods, maker of Oreos, had created an ad in support of gay rights. The ad showed a giant Oreo cookie whose filling contained all the colors of the rainbow. According to One Million Moms, “Kraft needs to know that there are competitors that make similar products. Siding with radical homosexuals has its price. There are plenty of cookies on the market for moms to buy that do not support liberal causes.”

Really? Most off-brand versions of Oreo cookies taste terrible. My call to action was to buy a package of Oreo cookies and enjoy eating every last one.

This leads me to One Million Moms' call to action regarding the Boy Scouts. One Million Moms were up in arms about the Boy Scouts’ proposed resolution, which would allow there to be gay scouts, even if they wouldn’t allow gay scout leaders. Here’s what One Million Moms had to say:

“The [proposed] BSA resolution doesn’t allow a gay adult to go on a camp-out with boys but may put an ‘experienced,’ gay 17-year-old with a 12-year-old boy on his first camp-out. This creates a perfect environment for sexual abuse within scouting.”

How is this any different from what goes on now? How do the Boy Scouts know if a potential scout is gay? I suppose they could put sensors that measure arousal on the boys’ crotches and make them look at pictures of naked men. This is one of the only ways that researchers can tell, and even then, they still get lots of false negatives and positives.

It’s also clear that One Million Moms doesn’t know much about sexual orientation. It’s no more possible for a homosexual Boy Scout to turn a straight scout gay than it is for Christian counselors to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals. “Conversion” works no better on a camping trip than in a therapist’s office.

But if the Boy Scouts’ resolution does pass, I wouldn’t be surprised if One Million Moms demanded that gay Boy Scouts have to wear pink badges.

So there you have it—issues with Ellen, Person of Interest, Suits, the Geico Pig, and now the Boy Scouts. These are some of the things I learned about since joining One Million Moms. I also learned that membership in One Million Moms has its advantages. It provides access to the email addresses of whomever they are trying to bully. That way, if you don’t agree with their call to action, it will take you less than a minute to send a message of tolerance.

And that brings me to the most important thing I learned since joining One Million Moms—it’s about standing up and being counted. Whether you believe in God or not, if you don’t speak up when groups like this are using the name of God to spread intolerance, theirs is the only voice that will be heard. And that’s exactly what they want.