If you've ever visited the outwardly homophobic and racist Christwire.org, it's likely that within one minute of skimming the home page you asked yourself, "Is this site real?" But — and here's where it gets interesting —if you then hung around to read a few of the articles, you might not have been able to answer your own question with certainty, because when it comes to today's Christian conservative fight for moral righteousness, truth is almost always stranger than fiction.
The debate over the "truthiness" of this site has been going on for quite some time. Some readers, like me, believe that it's an offshoot of TheOnion.com, one of the finest (if not the finest) parody sites on the Web. Others are convinced that it's absolutely what it claims to be: A site promoting "Conservative Values for an Unsaved World." Those readers are so convinced, that they link to Christwire stories to support their arguments both for and against the Christian conservative movement. In other words, it's not only the fools that are fooled.
But the main reason why it's hard for some to believe that this site is a joke is because alongside the unbelievable stories, like the ones linked to above, are reports spun from actual headlines.
For example, Christwire's '"Amazon Stands Up To The Gay Agenda," from last April, fed off of legitimate reports of Amazon.com's internal cataloging glitch that accidentally removed more than 57,000 books, mainly those focusing on gay themes, from its sales rankings and main search page. But, instead of reporting the truth, here's what Christwire published:
Amazon is removing sales rank numbers from Homo Agenda based books because they don’t want queer material showing up in searches and best seller lists. BRAVO!
One of the main books they are removing from sales ranking is the sin marinated book by Ellen DeGeneres. This book does nothing but promote lesbian love and gay “rights”. Good thing Amazon agrees with us and knows that gays don’t have any rights besides burning in the fires of hell.
I’m so happy to see Amazon standing up and saying no to hardcore porn books written by these queer demons to promote their sinful lifestyle onto our young children.
Amazon knows that if they are forced to post gay books, they will soon have to promote books like “How to Molest a Child” or “How to sin against God, by playing with another mans tinkle twattle.”
We applaud you Amazon. Keep up the great work and thanks for helping us putting a stop to these queers.
Although that report can be filed under ridiculous, it can't necessarily be filed under 'parody,' because if you're aware of what some Christian conservatives have said about gay literature in the past, it's not at all far-fetched.
For example, take a look at this report posted on the non-satirical BrotherhoodNews.com (formerly GospelNews) last February about author Sheila Butt, a real woman with a real bad last name, who wrote a real book about homosexuality in response to "children’s books promoting [the homosexual] agenda, such as "Jennifer Has Two Daddies" (1983), "Daddy’s Roommate" (1991) ... and "Heather Has Two Mommies" (2000)." According to BrotherhoodNews.com, Butt's book "promote[s] God’s love for all people, while showing, in a loving way, that homosexuality is wrong."
What's the title of Butt's book? It is, unbelievably, this: "Does God Love Michael’s Two Daddies?"
And therein lies the basis and beauty of Christwire — it's almost too real to be fake.
Isn't it ... almost, I mean?
