AFA: WikiLeaks is about gays in the military, not Assange

A senior official at the American Family Association says the political storm over the WikiLeaks cables shows that gays shouldn't be allowed to serve in the military.

Bryan Fischer, the AFA's head of issues analysis, believes he knows what motivated the man thought to be behind the WikiLeaks release of State Department cables: A "homosexual" agenda.

Private Bradley Manning, who has been in US custody since he was linked to a WikiLeaks release earlier this year, "sold out his country in what may turn out to be fit of gay pique," Fischer writes at the AFA's blog.

Fischer, the AFA's director of issues analysis, writes that Manning "was, at a minimum, seriously confused about his sexuality, and at worst, launched the WikiLeaks campaign to strike back at the military for its 'Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell' policy, which he vehemently opposed."

Manning is "a one-man argument for keeping open homosexuals from serving in the military in the first place," Fischer continues. "If the 1993 law -- which flatly prohibits homosexuals from a place in the armed services -- had been followed, there would be no PFC Bradley Manning and no WikiLeaks."

Fischer provided no evidence that Manning was motivated by opposition to the military gay ban, but the soldier's sexual orientation is now a matter of record.

In a profile of Manning published Tuesday, the Globe and Mail reported that Manning "bridled under the military’s 'don’t ask, don’t tell' policy."

But computer hacker Adrian Lamo, who is believed to be the person who alerted authorities to the source of the leaks, said Manning was evidently “explaining how the first world exploits the third, in detail, from an internal perspective.”

The AFA is one of the US's most prominent conservative groups, claiming some 2 million supporters. Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center cited Fischer's anti-gay writings when it labeled the AFA a "hate group."

The AFA seeks to support “traditional moral values,” but in recent years it has seemed to specialize in “combating the homosexual agenda.” In 2009, it hired Bryan Fischer ... as its director of analysis for government and policy. ... Fischer claimed in a blog post last May 27 that “[h]omosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and 6 million dead Jews.” ... Fischer has described Hitler as “an active homosexual” who sought out gays “because he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough.” He proposed criminalizing homosexual behavior in another 2010 blog post and has advocated forcing gays into “reparative” therapy.

Last week, on World AIDS Day, Fischer wrote a column urging governments to stop funding AIDS research, because "we know the cause, we know the cure: stop engaging in homosexual sex and stop shooting up with drugs."

That prompted LGBT activists to accuse Fischer of deliberately wanting to "let AIDS run rampant."

Fischer has been criticized for a number of other comments he has made since taking a position with the AFA. Notably, he was blasted for equating gay sex with domestic terrorism, and raised some eyebrows with what appeared to be a call to eradicate grizzly bears.