Tupelo, Mississippi, is best known as the birthplace of Elvis Presley, and his childhood home remains the town’s top attraction. Another local performer, however, has recently garnered national attention. For two hours every weekday, a broadcaster named Bryan Fischer hosts “Focal Point,” a popular Christian radio talk show. He is one of the country’s most vocal opponents of what he calls “the homosexual-rights movement.” As he puts it, “A rational culture that cares about its people will, in fact, discriminate against adultery, pedophilia, rape, bestiality, and, yes, homosexual behavior.” His goal is to make this view the official stance of the Republican Party.

In April, Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, hired an openly gay man, Richard Grenell, to serve as his campaign’s national-security spokesman. The next day, Fischer launched a public attack on Grenell, a Republican foreign-policy expert who had previously worked as the spokesman for John Bolton, President George W. Bush’s Ambassador to the United Nations. Fischer had no argument with Grenell’s political views, which are consistently hawkish. The problem was his sex life: gay men, Fischer said, have “random, frequent, and anonymous sexual encounters—that becomes a significant issue when we talk about appointing somebody to a post as sensitive as the spokesman for national security.” After other conservative pundits took up Fischer’s cause, Grenell resigned from the Romney campaign. The resulting controversy has helped make gay rights one of the defining social issues of the 2012 campaign.

The one-story concrete building where Fischer works is indistinguishable from neighboring offices occupied by dentists, except that its front entrance features a statue of a fetus enshrined in a heart and a shoulder-high stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Inside, plaques bearing the words “In God We Trust” underscore that this is the national headquarters of the American Family Association, a nonprofit advocacy group. A “pro-family ministry” founded in 1977, it promotes Bible-based social conservatism and criticizes what it regards as sinful popular culture.

Like much of the religious right, the A.F.A. was losing traction until Barack Obama was elected President, in 2008. His victory galvanized the group. Its leaders saw Obama as a radical proponent of godless socialism. According to a former employee, staff members at the Tupelo office passed around an image of Obama’s face blended with that of Adolf Hitler, against a backdrop of a swastika. The former employee, who found the image disrespectful, recalls, “Things really took a turn. They were no longer civil about the opposition. The goal became to defeat Obama.” In 2009, the A.F.A. hired Fischer as its director of issue analysis and as the host of “Focal Point,” which is broadcast from a studio across the street.

The American Family Association’s radio network comprises two hundred stations in thirty-five states, and Fischer’s program reaches more than a million listeners a day. That’s a fraction of Rush Limbaugh’s audience, but as large as that of Rachel Maddow or Chris Matthews, on MSNBC. Until recently, Fischer’s rising popularity escaped notice in the mainstream media, in part because his show is broadcast primarily on stations in the Southeast and the Midwest, including small cities such as Tullahoma, Tennessee, and Piggott, Arkansas. But his program is part of a parallel media universe that provides news and commentary, on everything from science to American history, from a perspective that is far to the right of Fox News.

Fischer is a tall man with a wide mouth, a prominent nose, a tanned face, and carefully groomed hair that is as white as a cotton ball. He is proud to be at the far end of the American political spectrum. When I visited his office, I asked him if he could name anyone who had more conservative social beliefs. “Well, Thomas Jefferson,” he said. “He wanted to castrate homosexuals—I don’t want to do that.” (Jefferson’s position was actually a liberal reform: at the time, homosexuality was punishable by death.) Fischer does, however, want to change homosexuals. “We’re not animals in heat that have a biological compulsion to yield to every sexual impulse,” Fischer said. Gays, he said, can experience a “reorienting of their sexuality—it can be done. Like the saying goes, ‘I’ve never met an ex-black, but I’ve met a lot of ex-gays.’ If one person can do it, two people can do it.”

Fischer, who jokes that his “listening audience is more conservative than conservatives,” represents a powerful constituency. Rob Stein, the founder of the Democracy Alliance, a progressive fund-raising group, says that groups like the A.F.A. are part of “the largest, best-organized, most effective, and well-financed special-interest political infrastructure in America.” Julie Ingersoll, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, says that the goal of Christian conservatives such as Fischer is to “shape every aspect of the culture in accordance with Biblical law, including politics.” Though it’s impossible to say how decisive a role this bloc will play in November, Ingersoll notes that, in the 2012 primaries, it “succeeded in pushing the Republican Party far to the right.” She adds, “The campaign that Romney’s had to run is very different from the one he ran four years ago. Who would have thought, for instance, that contraception would be an issue?” In February, Romney expressed opposition to a Senate amendment that would have permitted employers to deny insurance coverage for birth control on religious or moral grounds; after his statement was denounced by religious conservatives, he reversed himself.

Jonah Goldberg, the conservative columnist, has written that Fischer is an extremist with little influence and “doesn’t speak for any members of the Christian right I know.” Fischer’s successful campaign against Grenell, however, suggests that it is unwise to underestimate him. Patrick Mahoney, the director of the conservative Christian Defense Coalition, in Washington, D.C., told me, “Bryan is definitely ascending. His influence is growing because he says publicly, in an unfiltered way, what many evangelical leaders think privately. He’s fearless.”

Fischer’s attack against Grenell started on Friday, April 20th, with a post on Twitter. “Romney picks out & loud gay as a spokesman,” he tweeted, soon after learning of the hire. “If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.” The next Monday, Fischer opened his show—which is broadcast, he likes to say, on “the most feared radio network in America!”—by telling his listeners that he had “kicked up a dust storm in the Twitterverse.”

Although Grenell has long been in a committed relationship, and has been an advocate of gay marriage, Fischer told listeners that gay people “are not about commitment.” Citing unspecified “surveys,” Fischer said that homosexuals have “five hundred to as many as a thousand sexual partners over the course of a lifetime!” He went on, “I mean, the possibilities are virtually endless that this guy could wind up being compromised.”

Fischer said that Romney was “sticking his thumb in our eye” and “signalling to the homosexual lobby . . . ‘I’m with you, I’m not with the pro-family community.’ ” He warned, “He cannot win without an enthusiastic evangelical base.” Fischer then told listeners that he had called the Republican National Committee that morning, demanding to know whether the Party considered homosexual behavior “healthy or harmful.” “We need some clarification!” he said.

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In another era, Fischer’s comments might not have registered widely. But the American Family Association takes full advantage of modern communications technology, providing Fischer with an online column, making available live video streams of “Focal Point,” maintaining a Web archive of his shows, and sending e-mail news alerts to more than two million people. In the evangelical community, Stein says, “Web fires are lit every day.” And when the outrage gets hot enough it attracts the attention of major news organizations. The morning after Fischer made his comments, a producer at CNN booked him for a live debate with R. Clarke Cooper, the executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, a group that supports gay rights.

Fischer was clearly excited by the national attention. On his next show, he said, “They went to look for somebody to talk about Governor Romney’s homosexual hire, where did they come? They came to AFR talk network!”

He began a long disquisition about homosexuals, and suggested that they were more prone to domestic violence than straight people. He then denied, as he does routinely, that H.I.V. causes AIDS, calling it a “harmless passenger virus.” It’s a theory derived from Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at Berkeley, who has been widely criticized. Duesberg has been a guest on Fischer’s program. (Fischer told me, “He has a seven-hundred-page book—I read that thing through from the beginning to the end of it, and was persuaded.”)

Fischer returned to a favorite theme: that homosexual behavior is “always, always, always a matter of choice.” He told his listeners that a scientific study had shown the concordance of homosexuality between identical twins to be only six per cent. “If one of them is gay and it’s genetically caused, the other one ought to be gay one hundred per cent of the time!” he said.

Fischer cites such evidence with ease; he has impressive recall for everything from Bible quotations to academic articles. Yet he draws his information almost exclusively from like-minded sources, and ignores contrary statistics. For instance, in 2003, psychologists at the University of London performed a meta-analysis of six studies involving the concordance rate of homosexuality between identical twins, and reported a range from thirty to sixty-five per cent—far greater than the average occurrence of homosexuality in the population at large. The evidence, they concluded, strongly suggested a “heritable component.”

Fischer has similarly cited a 2001 study by Robert Spitzer, the retired Columbia psychiatrist, suggesting that homosexuals could successfully undergo “reparative” therapy. But Fischer has not mentioned that the American Psychiatric Association publicly disavowed the study at the time. Spitzer himself recently renounced the paper, and apologized for making “unproven claims.” (Fischer dismissed this, saying, “He just caved to the gay lobby.”)

To make his case that Grenell posed a national-security risk, Fischer presented a prurient scenario: “What if he’s travelling for Mitt Romney on government business?. . . He’s overseas somewhere . . . he’s got top-secret information in his hotel room, and he just can’t help himself? He’s gotta have an anonymous tryst with some homosexual?” A caller pointed out that straight people also take sexual risks. (Indeed, the recent Secret Service scandal involved male agents consorting with female prostitutes in Colombia.) Fischer was unfazed, maintaining his view that Romney’s choice of Grenell was “a very disturbing appointment.”