TUPELO, Miss. — The most famous man in Tupelo spends hours each day scrolling through his Google Reader, printing out articles, and stacking them by topic on his dark wooden desk in preparation for his afternoon radio show.

And that’s how the stunning news reached Bryan Fischer one recent Friday morning: Mitt Romney had hired an openly, proudly gay man, Richard Grenell, as his foreign policy spokesman.

“I felt it was a signal from Romney to the homosexual lobby, that you’ve got a friend,” recalled Fischer, the whose formal title is Director of Issue Analysis for the American Family Association.

Fischer sounded the alarm on Twitter: “Romney picks out & loud gay as a spokesman. If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.”

Fischer isn’t a Twitter native — he uses it as a broadcast medium, and follows only 26 people — but the clarity and confidence of his views is made for the medium. And that tweet was the spark that set elements of the religious right into an attack on Grenell, one that — in Grenell’s reported view, if not the Romney campaign’s — ultimately led to the staffer’s high-profile resignation and Romney’s first high-profile general election stumble. The story “just snowballed from there.”

“We got Romney’s attention with Richard Grenell,” Fischer said in an interview in his Tupelo, Mississippi office. “We spooked him. Scared him straight.” Fischer sat back in his chair, a picture of Elvis Presley gyrating his hips on the wall behind him.

Grenell’s departure, Fischer told the audience of his show on the AFA’s talk radio network, “a huge win” for religious conservatives.

The complex campaign flap and the massive publicity around it was also a huge win for Fischer, who has emerged from more or less nowhere — a 29-year pastoral sojourn in Idaho — to become the most visible and defiant figure on the embattled religious right. The unapologetic culture warriors of the 1980s — Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and American Family Association Founder Don Wildmon, among others — have passed away or faded from the cultural landscape. A new generation of Republican politicians is more sensitive to the party’s libertarian strain, while a new generation of Evangelical leaders, led by the California megachurch pastor Rick Warren, has taken a step back from combative cultural politics.

But as other conservative leaders have sought to move with the times, Fischer has tacked in the opposite direction, toward strident and unapologetic attacks on homosexuality in particular. And as bluntly anti-gay rhetoric becomes associated with the fringe — with, in particular, the Topeka-based Westboro Baptist Churck and its notorious “God Hates Fags” signs — the 61-year old Fischer, may be the last out-and-proud anti-gay conservative still inside the Republican Party tent. Every Republican candidate except Romney visited Fischer’s show this year, and he regularly hosts Republican members of Congress. He has a key speaking slot at the Values Voter Summit every year, and the organization shrugged off Romney’s all-purpose denunciation of Fischer at last year’s summit as a speaker of “poisonous” language.

The Grenell issue was illustrative of Fischer’s new, leading role. Other voices on his side were notably more cautious, including even former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who pointed out that gays were part of the Reagan and Bush administrations and stressed that “our concern is policy.” Other leaders only echoed what Fischer had started.

And with Grenell’s exit, Fischer scored his first real coup, and seems poised to benefit more from conservatives’ disillusionment with Romney than any of the evangelical leaders who have fallen into line with the Republican nominee.

“He’s fearless. He’s prophetic. He will stand on principle regardless of where the chips may fall,” said his friend and regular Focal Point guest Patrick Mahoney, the director of the Christian Defense Coalition. Mahoney said modern-day evangelical leaders “are much less prophetic and direct than Bryan.” Mahoney compared Fischer to the older generation of big-name Christian right leaders, like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, but with an important difference: “Bryan understands getting the message out.”

Getting Fischer’s message out is now a large-scale production at the AFA’s Tupelo headquarters. Fischer hosts a two-hour radio show broadcast to hundreds of stations five days a week on AFR talk, plus a regular column and blog at the American Family Association’s website, a Twitter account, and increasingly regular appearances on CNN. This has also, of course, made him a target, something he doesn’t seem to mind. Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart recently showed a clip of Fischer Skyping in to a CNN interview, quipping “In case you're wondering why he looks so blurry, it's because his opinions are being broadcast from 50 years ago.” He’s declined to appear with Stewart more than once, he said, and declined an invitation to “talk about the message of Easter” with Stephen Colbert because he doesn’t think Easter is funny.

The cable exposure stems from Fischer’s eagerness to connect biblical narratives to contemporary politics, and his intense interest in the current presidential campaign. Fischer endorsed Rick Perry and described him as “as close as we were going to get to the whole package,” but switched his endorsement to social conservative darling Rick Santorum after Perry dropped out.

Fischer talks about Barack Obama as a menace to American national security, whose policies Fischer claims to have been baffled by until a video of Obama supporting a left-wing, African American Harvard Law Professor, Derrick Bell, re-emerged this spring.

“Is he just inept? Is he just incompetent? Or is this all purposeful?” Fischer asked. These were rhetorical questions.

“The conclusion I’ve come to is that he’s doing this purposefully because he believes that the U.S. needs to be punished for being a racist nation,” Fischer explained. "He is out to punish the United States for being racist.”

When Fischer is in the process of saying things that are likely to stir outrage, his voice becomes even more measured, more thoughtful, as you’d expect from a man who wanted to become a Bible teacher, and who knows that the truth is on his side.

Of liberals and moderates who accuse him of bigotry, he says: “The truth is not bigoted. The truth is not hate speech. And criticism is not hate, it is not hatred. Because if it is, then the left hates me. They’re bigoted. They’re prejudiced. They’re biased.”

Fischer also stresses that he has nothing but Christian love for gays. He draws the line, for instance, at Westboro Baptist, and denounced the group a decade ago in Idaho. Fischer says Westboro picketed his church back then for being "too pro-gay."

But Fischer is perhaps the last blunt, outsider voice in the 20th century culture war tradition. And the most direct model for Fischer is Donald Wildmon, the radio host and United Methodist minister set up shop in Tupelo in 1977 under the banner of the National Federation for Decency. That group would become the American Family Association, and Wildmon is now its chairman emeritus; his son, Tim, took the reins in 2010.

Wildmon was, with Falwell and Robertson, a pioneer among the blunt and combative culture warriors. He directed his campaigns at the sexual revolution, forcing Sears, for instance, to withdraw its advertising from “Charlie’s Angels” and “Three’s Company,” and has remained an unapologetic champion of the Christian backlash against the gay right movement. When the Boy Scouts stood buy their ban on gay scoutmasters, he congratulated the group on its refusal "expose its young members to lonely sodomites.”

Fischer describes the elder Wildmon fondly as “the pitbull of the pro-family movement.”

Wildmon built a media empire out of a two low-slung brown buildings in a modest office park in Tupelo, a northeast Mississippi town of 35,000. The American Family Association now employs about 180 people and operates two radio networks: AFR Talk, and the larger music- and Bible-focused Inspiration network (or “inspo,” as the staff calls it), as well as putting out a magazine and other forms of outreach.

The grounds include a large room where engineers handle the machinery for the radio networks on plywood tables, and a chapel where the staff holds a daily morning devotional as well as a yearly phone-a-thon to raise money. A large replica of the Ten Commandments greets visitors before entering the main building.

Fischer, now by far the group’s best-known figure, occupies a small office in what the staff calls “leader’s corner,” near president Tim Wildmon. It’s enough space for a bookshelf, desk, and that photo of Elvis, who was born in Tupelo. Fischer isn’t a southerner, though. He was born in Oklahoma, the son of a minister. The family moved frequently, and Fischer spent his junior high and high school years in Fresno, California.

“My dad was the one who introduced me to a relationship with Christ,” Fischer said. “So I’ve always had a strong Christian faith.”

Fischer is over six feet tall, with intense blue eyes framed half the time by rectangular glasses and a shock of white hair. He favors button-downs with a slight sheen and dons a tie for his show, which viewers can watch on the Internet as well as listen to on the radio. On his left hand, he wears an ornate wedding ring, and the other hand bears his Stanford class ring (white gold, he noted). Fischer went to Stanford from 1969 to 1973 and was a in a fraternity; he recalls some frat brothers’ irritation at the popularity of the bible studies he led.

After Fischer finished at the Dallas Theological Seminary, the family moved to Boise, where Fischer led the Community Church of the Valley and ran the Idaho Values Alliance, an affiliate of AFA.