LISTEN: If Rose Parade Can Have Gay Wedding, Why Not Stoning?

Right-wing reactions to the wedding of a gay couple on a Rose Parade float New Year's Day are continuing to pour in, with one antigay activist theorizing about stoning and another seeking an ostensibly more receptive audience for his rants in Russia.

On a recent edition of the fundamentalist Christian Generations Radio program, producer Dave Buehner asked host Kevin Swanson, "I wonder what the Rose Bowl parade would do if we had the stoning of a homosexual along the parade just as an expression of free speech and all that." Swanson replied that organizers likely wouldn't allow that, even if, as Buehner suggested, "the stones were just made, like, of flowers and flower petals," as the parade's floats are. Nonetheless, Swanson said, "This is another instance in which the degradation of our society is going mainstream."

Buehner also expressed surprise that the wedding was taking place on a float sponsored by an AIDS service organization (the AIDS Healthcare Foundation). "This is a group that's against AIDS?" he said. "They're not trying to spread AIDS, right? I mean, if you are trying to spread AIDS, you would have pro-homosexual propaganda, but if you're trying to stop it..."

Later in the show, Swanson said LGBT people and their allies "are coming after Christians ... to make sure they lose their jobs, to make sure that they are persecuted, to make sure that they may even be burned at the stake." To prevent this, he said, "we have to draw lines ourselves and encourage the civil magistrate to prosecute homosexuality, especially public acts of homosexuality."

Speaking of prosecution, another antigay leader, Brian Brown, discussed his thoughts on the parade with Voice of Russia, a radio service run by the Russian government, which has criminalized any positive mention of LGBT people as "propaganda" if the information is accessible to minors.

Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, told Voice of Russia last week that having the wedding of Aubrey Loots and Danny Leclaire in the nationally televised Southern California parade amounted to same-sex marriage being "shoved in the face of families."

All along, we've been hearing from activists who support same-sex marriage, 'Hey, if we redefine marriage, it won't have any effect on you, this is about loving individuals, what they decide to do, it will have no effect on you,'" Brown said. "Well, lo and behold, it has to be shoved in the face of families. ... The idea that you would target children and make this about using a family event to sort of indoctrinate kids, that's just wrong."

Listen to segments from both programs below, courtesy of Right Wing Watch.