Piety in the NCGOP

The News & Observer, March 5, 2018:

Trump pick on bench is ‘tantamount to Hitler wreaking havoc’ among Jews, NAACP leader says
BY ANNE BLYTHE

RALEIGH 
The head of the state NAACP and others in the organization traveled to Washington recently to try once again to persuade a few Republican senators to block the appointment of Thomas Farr to the federal bench.

The Rev. T. Anthony Spearman, head of the state NAACP, made a comparison to Adolf Hitler at a news conference before visiting senators on Capitol Hill. His comments drew a rebuke Monday evening from state Republicans.

Spearman and others who spoke noted that the Eastern District of North Carolina, a 44-county region from Raleigh to the coast, has a black population of more than 25 percent but the U.S. Senate has never confirmed the appointment of a black judge to that bench...

...“Tom Farr in the Eastern District with the legal authority to decide the fate of African-Americans — hear me somebody — is tantamount to Adolf Hitler wreaking havoc among our Jewish sisters and brothers, and Saul, who later became the apostle Paul, breathing out cruelty to Christians,” Spearman added.

...The state Republican Party issued a news release calling Spearman’s comments “racist and anti-Semitic hate speech.”

...Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the NC GOP, said in a statement," There is simply no place for a state leader to refer to those who have different political philosophies as Adolf Hitler.”

Actually, it's an article of faith among Republicans in pretty much every state. Woodhouse should know. Here's what he said about HB2:

The Washington Post, April 2016: 

Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, argued that the bathroom bill — if properly framed — will help McCrory with suburban women, not just rural voters.

Ohio State University, Origins, August 2011:

But Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association says that gay people helped bring Nazism to Germany.

The first statement is an opinion, about which reasonable people can and do disagree. But the second one is a flat-out lie, which makes reasoned dialogue and disagreement impossible.

And here's why it matters: Several of the GOP candidates have allied themselves with the AFA. Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Herman Cain have all appeared on Fischer's radio show. And the newest kid on the block in the Republican race, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, was the featured speaker at an AFA-sponsored prayer rally on Aug. 6 at Houston's Reliant Stadium.

But none of these GOP hopefuls have challenged Fischer, who insists that Adolf Hitler and many of his storm troopers were gay. "So it was homosexual thugs that helped Hitler to form the Nazi Party," Fischer told a radio audience in June, adding that the Party began "in a gay bar in Munich."

Mediaite, July 2012:

[Former RedState editor and CNN commentator Erik Erickson] "has even compared proponents of gay rights to Nazis. He didn’t do it in some subtle, open-to-interpretation way, either. His headline was “Gay Rights Proponents Act Like the Third Reich,” and in case you thought he was just exaggerating, the first sentence of his piece was “Yes, I know about Goodwin’s law, but comparing gay rights activists to the Nazis is fitting.”

San Antonio Express-News, March 2016:

Kyle Biedermann has a simple explanation for why he once posed for a photograph in a Hitler costume with a swastika on his arm and a pink sash around his neck while smiling and making a Nazi “sieg heil” salute.

It was for charity.

A self-declared “conservative, Christian Republican,” Biedermann is running to unseat state Rep. Doug Miller, R-New Braunfels, in Texas House District 73, which covers Comal, Gillespie and Kendall counties just north of San Antonio. After winning about 36 percent of the vote in the March primary, Biedermann is facing Miller in a May 24 runoff.

Biedermann dressed up like “gay Hitler,” he said, for a Saturday Night Live-themed costume party that benefited a Fredericksburg food pantry about eight years ago. “Gay Hitler” was a character portrayed on the television comedy show in 2001 by actor Chris Kattan.

“What would be offensive about that photograph?” Biedermann asked on Wednesday. “This whole thing is about political correctness. It’s not a problem for me whatsoever.”

Nonetheless, Biedermann removed the photograph from his Facebook page before running for office.

When asked why he would remove a photograph that’s not offensive, he said, “Well, because the incumbents — I mean my opponent, they would, you know, you know how it is, people are going to take it out of context.”

SBS.com, January 2017:

North Dakota Republican politician Janne Myrdal insists she did not intend to compare gay people to Nazis.

Using her personal Facebook page last week, Myrdal shared an article entitled: ‘The Forgotten Gays Part II: Is the LGBT On Crack?’—which featured a rainbow flag with a Swastika overlay.

The article—posted on the website Conservatives 4 Palin— attacked the LGBT+ community for influencing singer Jennifer Holliday’s decision to not perform at the Trump inauguration.

The piece went on to say that the LGBT+ movement is “laser focused on being a for-profit professional agitation group” and that “it’s time for the radical and extreme voices of the LGBT to be replaced by the normal level headed forgotten gays".

Pink News, August 2017:

A Republican with ties to Senator Ted Cruz has claimed that the evil spirit behind the Nazis is now pushing the “homosexual lifestyle”.

The extraordinary claim comes from David Barton, who is the former vice chair of the Republican Party of Texas and the  former director of the ‘Keep the Promise PAC’, which supported Senator Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign. 

Barton made the claim on his WallBuilders Live radio show, noticed by Right Wing Watch.

Forward, September 2017:

Roy Moore has won a primary election to run as the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Alabama. Two years ago, he compared gay marriage to the Holocaust to explain why he refused to accept a Supreme Court decision on the issue.

If you’d even consider asking “What’s the difference?” between Nazi Germany’s systematic murder of six million Jews and legal gay marriage, consider running for a seat on Alabama’s State Supreme Court. Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore made just that comparison on June 29.

“Could I do this if I were in Nuremberg… say that I was following the orders of the highest authority to kill Jews?… Could I say I was ordered to do so?” The shocked interviewer reminded Moore that the Nuremberg trials had been about murder, not gay marriage. “Is there a difference?” he asked.

Moore’s comments were echoed by his personal attorney, Win Johnson, whom Moore appointed director of the legal staff of the state’s Administrative Office of Courts. Johnson was incensed by Governor Robert Bentley’s statement that he personally disagreed with the ruling, but would “uphold the law of the nation and this is now law.” He responded to the Governor in a letter that opened with “Jesus Christ is Lord of All.”

And then it got really weird.