This New Yorker Profile of Bryan Fischer explains much…

Fischer’s political activism, however, began years before the advent of same-sex-marriage laws. In fact, his preoccupation with family dysfunction seems to have started with his own…

Fischer didn’t volunteer anything about his mother, but, when pressed, said, “My parents divorced when I was about twenty. It just rocked my world.” His mother, who worked as an interior decorator at a furniture store, was “chronically late,” and the bus driver on her route to work would always hold the bus for her. Eventually, he said, “my mom fell for the bus driver,” deserting him, his father, and his younger sister. “I don’t want to go into it,” Fischer said…

A former leader of the religious right in Boise who was friends with Fischer for twenty years before Fischer cut him off…a common theme in Fischer’s friendships apparently…said that Fischer, “had a deep-rooted disappointment in his father, for not being strong enough”, which Fischer denies.  But over the years Fischer has been relentless in his belief that women should have no power or even a voice in church matters, time and again either leaving a church or being forced out over issues of gender and women’s role in religious life. It may seem too pat to lay all of this on Fischer’s inability to let go of what his mom did, but the obvious connection isn’t always wrong either.

I could sympathize with Fischer…after all I’m also the product of a “broken home”…except that he’s made a career out of punishing other people’s families for the sins of his own.  I made peace with dad long ago.  He was not the best of examples but mom loved him all the same and she did her level best to raise me as well as any kid ever got raised despite the scorn and contempt self righteous moral scolds like Fischer heaped on her. All in all I am very glad it was mom who raised me and not dad after the split. But for all his faults and crimes I loved him and only wished he would let mom show him a better way to live after all. But mom did her best for me, not just telling me that better way but living it in front of me every day, and everything I am today I owe to that.

Still, let me say absolutely that if I had to choose between being raised by dad or by the likes of Bryan Fischer I would without hesitation choose to be raised by the thief rather then the bully.