Bryan Fischer said children not attending drag queen story time is an upside of coronavirus. (Getty/YouTube)
Bryan Fischer has joined the leagues of bigots using coronavirus to make ridiculous anti-LGBT+ statements, claiming an upside of the pandemic could be that children won’t be “indoctrinated” by drag queens while schools are closed.
The radio host, designated an “extremist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center for his “long history of anti-gay activism”, published a rambling blog post about the positives of coronavirus.
Despite having no medical or public health expertise, Fischer starts his missive by dismissing the response to the coronavirus entirely, saying the pandemic is being “hysterically hyped beyond all reason”.
After several paragraphs opposing self-isolation measures, Fischer asks the question on absolutely nobody’s lips: “Can anything good come out of coronavirus?”
The answer, for him, is yes.
“Closing public schools will protect vulnerable young children from force-fed indoctrination into the absurd and anti-science environmental agenda,” he wrote on the American Family Association website.
It will protect them from being brainwashed into normalising sexual deviancy, gender confusion and drag queen story hours.
Fischer ends his op-ed by suggesting that coronavirus could create “a fantastic, once-in-a-generation opportunity to reverse some anti-family trends and move back toward the America we used to be”, which we’re struggling to read as anything but “make it less gay”.
GLAAD responds to Bryan Fischer.
LGBT+ activist and author Jeremy Hooper responded to Fischer’s bizarre rant on the GLAAD website.
He said it was typical of the American Family Association (AFA), which Fischer was previously a director and spokesperson of, “to latch onto a worldwide crisis and use it to continue their anti-LGBTQ crusade”.
“Parents all over this country are struggling to figure out both care and education for their children who have now lost their schools and teachers,” he continued.
“How heartless can you be to look at this, one of the most impactful blows to working families to stem from coronavirus, and tell these families that their burden and lost educational opportunities for their children is actually a blessing?
“While you all spend this time of crisis misplacing your ‘values’ and pushing your un-American obsessions that seek to harm families, the rest of us will work to save the world from normalising deviant values like yours.”
Hate group distanced itself from Bryan Fischer.
Fischer rose to infamy after joining AFA in 2009. A year later, it was designated a hate group.
The former pastor was effectively ousted by AFA in 2015 after years of derogatory statements about Black people, Muslim and Jewish communities, Indigenous Americans and the LGBT+ community – including the suggestion that gay men were to blame for the Holocaust.
He maintains that he wasn’t “fired” and simply chose to give up his spokesman role while remaining a host of AFA’s radio station, American Family Radio.