Faith and Freedom's Gary Randall Caught Plagiarizing. . . Again

It has been a while since I have taken on Washington State's demagogic theocrat, Gary Randall.  Today I feel ready to wade once again into his conservative Christian swamp, and with good reason; Mr. Randall has once again plagiarized in his post (as I previously documented).

In his post on the danger of hate crimes legislation, Randall shows us how full of "it" he is.  Once again he points-out laws in other countries that have restricted the free exercise of speech; but he doesn't tell us that in the US we have had such laws in place for racial discrimination, and yet racism can still be found in the American public arena.  He wants us to focus on the injustices of countries that DON'T have First Amendment protections, and forget that ours does:

* Iceland forbids "ridiculing, slandering, insulting or threatening" protected classes including homosexuals.

* Sweden's hate speech law even bans expressing "disrespect."

* In Italy, an atheist has taken a priest to the European court of Human Rights on a complaint of "religious racism" for teaching that Jesus existed.

Oh wait, that isn't Randall's writing, he completely lifted it from a Focus on the Family article.  We can thank an anonymous commenter on the FFN blog for providing us with the link to the source of Randall's "copy and paste" authorship:

• Ireland prohibits words or behaviors that are “threatening, abusive or insulting and are intended or … are likely to stir up hatred” on the basis of one’s sexual orientation.
• Iceland forbids “ridiculing, slandering, insulting, threatening” protected classes, including homosexuals.
• Sweden’s hate-speech law bans even expressing “disrespect.”
• In Italy, an atheist is taking a priest to the European Court of Human Rights on a complaint of “religious racism” for teaching that Jesus existed.

If you go through and compare the two pages (as the same anonymous commenter does in defending his accusation) you find that Randall's post is riddled with "copy and paste" plagiarism, which as our commentator points out, "If Gary had handed this post in to a college prof, he'd likely be facing a disciplinary review for plagerism."  No doubt, he even lifted the title of his post from the Focus article!

Beyond the basic dishonesty that this points to in our local theocrat, this also shows him up as nothing more than the parrot political hack of Focus on the Family, Coral Ridge Ministries, Concerned Women for America, and numerous other far right American theocrats.

But he shouldn't be afraid, his base, plagiarized homophobia will still be protected once the current hate crimes legislation is enacted. 

tags: randall  ffn  plagiarism  theocracy  theocrats  homophobia  

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