FISCHER: NOT MUCH WORSE THAN ESTEEMED SCHOLAR JONAH GOLDBERG

This is getting some attention right now:

A top official with a leading social conservative group recently laid out the view that Adolf Hitler deliberately recruited gays to be his "enforcers," because they had "no limits" to "the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict."

During a radio broadcast, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association explained:

So Hitler himself was an active homosexual. And some people wonder, didn't the Germans, didn't the Nazis, persecute homosexuals? And it is true they did; they persecuted effeminate homosexuals. But Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals.

This would seem astonishing, appalling, outrageously over the top ... except that it's not really much crazier that what the brilliant scholar Jonah Goldberg told us in his masterwork, Liberal Fascism:

While it is true that some homosexuals were sent to concentration camps, it is also the case that the early Nazi Party and the constellation of Pan-German organizations in its orbit were rife with homosexuals. It's well-known, for example, that Ernst Rohm, the head of the SA, and his coterie were homosexuals, and openly so.... Some try to suggest that Rohm was murdered on the Night of the Long Knives because he was gay. But the Rohm faction posted the greatest threat to Hitler's consolidation of power because they were, in important respects, the most ardent and "revolutionary" Nazis. Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams write in The Pink Swastika that "the National Socialist revolution and the Nazi party were animated and dominated by militaristic homosexuals, pederasts, pornographers, and sadomasochists." This is surely an overstatement. But it is nonetheless true that the artistic and literary movements provided the oxygen for Nazism before 1933 were chockablock with homosexual liberationist tracts, clubs and journals.

Ah yes -- Scott Lively, last seen promising a "nuclear bomb" for gays in Uganda in a speech delivered shortly before a bill providing the death penalty for homosexuality was introduced in that country. The Pink Swastika (now in its fourth edition) is thoroughly denounced by serious scholars, who note the tremendous persecution of gays by the Nazis -- and yet it's just a slightly hyperbolic source for Goldberg.

Pat Robinson also takes Lively's thesis seriously:

"When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany," Pat Robertson once warned viewers of his 700 Club. "Many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were satanists. Many of them were homosexuals. The two seem to go together."

This cockamamie notion is not new, and it's not going away.

Oh, and Bryan Fischer? In addition to recently asserting that a whale should not have been allowed to kill a Sea World worker because the whale's handlers should have executed the whale according to biblical principles after an earlier incident, he's argued that all Muslims should be banned from the U.S. military, that homosexuality should be illegal, and that the 10th Amendment is U.S. citizens' only possibly remedy "other than bloodshed" for the horrors of the new health care law. This kind of talk apparently makews him many influential friends: Fischer has appeared on a Family Research Council anti-HCR webcast alongside GOP House members Michele Bachmann, Mike Pence, and Tom Price, and he'll be a featured speaker at the FRC's next Values Voter Summit alongside Bachmann, Pence, and possible future president of the United States Mike Huckabee.