Matt Barber

James Matthew "Matt" Barber is a right-wing hack who spends an enormous amount of time spreading hatred towards gay people. He is currently Associate Dean for Career and Professional Development at Liberty University, the Christian university founded by the late Jerry Falwell. He also has a degree from Pat Robertson's Regent University. He has worked with the Christian legal advocacy firm Liberty Counsel as their Director of Cultural Affairs and also helped run Concerned Women for America (because the women concerned need a man in charge, obviously). Barber is also founder of the website BarbWire.com, basically a Huffington Post wannabe with his twisted views. He is also a columnist for WorldNetDaily.

Homophobia
Imagine walking up to a happy gay or lesbian couple wandering through your nearest shopping mall and then delivering a barrage of hateful, homophobic statements. Give Matt Barber a radio microphone or a column on a conservative website and that's basically what he'll do.

He describes the loving and consensual relationships between gay men as "one man violently cramming his penis into another man’s lower intestine and calling it 'love'", while lesbians are "awkwardly mimicking natural procreative relations". Barber claims that the push for gay rights—or "a tyranny of sexually deviant rights" as he refers to them—is specifically designed to undermine the Constitution, as the "LGBT agenda and Constitutional rights cannot exist in harmony". Same-sex marriages are, according to Barber, "counterfeit". He also believes that gay people don't really want to get married, they just want to do so in order to destroy marriage and destroy religious freedom. He also believes that AIDS is a punishment for the sin of having gay sex.

Barber believes that homophobic and transphobic violence is just made up in order to advance the gay agenda: "What’s happening is they’re using this specter of some kind of notion of ‘mass violence’ committed against homosexuals, they do the same thing here in the United States, ‘mass discrimination,’ something where there is no evidence of course against people who are engaged in these behaviors". No evidence? Riiiight.

Barber believes the result of gay people being allowed to get married and adopt children is... "an androgynous America", therapists will be forced to tell children who have suffered sexual abuse that they are gay or transgender, where (gasp) children will be encouraged to talk to people of different races and backgrounds.

When the Conservative Political Action Conference decided to allow a Republican LGBT group, GOProud, as a co-sponsor, Barber spoke out against it and pulled Liberty Counsel and Liberty University's participation from the event.

Perhaps Barber's tackiest piece of anti-LGBT activism was "An open letter to gay kids" published on the suitably bonkers website WND, where he told LGBT youth that "Adult homosexual activists with a political agenda are using you as a pawn to achieve selfish goals in a dangerous political game" and that "it won't "get better"." His empowering message to gay teenagers is: you aren't really gay, except if you are, in which case you are a broken and flawed human being and you need Jesus not equal rights. Lovely. This only narrowly won out over his legal attempt with Liberty Counsel to prevent children from being able to see a gay parent in custody issues.

His argument for maintaining California's Proposition 8 is that a process known as "Marriage Extinction" will magically result if the Supreme Court rules it unconstitutional (whether this means that all American married couples will instantly vanish in puffs of pink smoke is left up to the fevered imagination of the reader of this article).

He asserted that tolerating T3H 3V1L GAY and "all forms of sexual deviant behavior" is "a cancer that brings down societies". He's also under the impression that gay marriage was a trigger for Noah's Flood - a strange theory that was advanced earlier by the equally strange Scott Lively.

His taste in humor might be considered a bit suspect, since he tweeted a fairly rank cartoon of a gay man tricking a Boy Scout into having sex. He's also under the impression that a push to legalize gay marriage was actually an effort by Satan to get the United States to officially embrace sin. A little later, he doubled down on his strange assertion and even declared cross-dressing an indication of UTT3R EV1L, which must make watching Some Like It Hot at the Barber residence an interesting experience.

Barber's obsession with demonizing efforts at LGBT-friendly inclusiveness doesn't merely verge on the unintentionally comical; he completely lost it over a voluntary Department of Justice pamphlet circulated to management concerning. Add yet another reference to cross-dressing and you get the feeling he'd go into palpitations over 5 minutes of Victor/Victoria.

Other things
In the few minutes of every day that Matt Barber isn't thinking about hunky gay studmuffins taking it up the ass, he can be found complaining about the full range of right-wing talking points.

President Obama: a Marxist, Communist Stalin-style figure? Obviously. Defending Rush Limbaugh for calling Sandra Fluke a slut for wanting to have birth control covered by her health insurance? Duh. Perhaps most entertaining is the attempt Barber made in September of 2012 to pass off a photo of an Obama campaign speech from May 2008 as actually being of a Romney speech in 2012, and then using said fake photo as evidence of a conspiracy by the media to claim falsely that support from Romney was dropping. Whoops.

Then there is his obsession with - you guessed it - the New World Order and Communism. Specifically, Barber thinks that there is widespread conspiracy of Communists dedicated to exterminating Christianity. Specific organizations involved in this are the ACLU, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, People for the American Way, and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Of course, it links right back to homosexuality; supremacy of the homogay is a goal of this conspiracy.

He also was responsible for a strange screed on WND entitled "Liberals and conservatives, unite!" which accomplished nothing of the sort and also drew a sharp reply from Buffalo Beast editor Ian Murphy, largely due to Murphy being referenced in the screed for all the usual batshit delusional wrong reasons.