BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
Simultaneous with its recently concluded Values Voter Summit, the
FRC announced the launching of its Values Voter Bus Tour aimed at
registering and mobilizing new voters. Tony Perkins' group is operating
on all cylinders and intends to drive voters to the GOP.
It has just concluded what it's calling the most successful Values
Voter Summit in its history, and is now getting ready to launch a year
long Values Voter Bus Tour aimed at influencing both the Republican
Party's presidential primaries and the 2012 presidential election.
It is a 12-million dollar a year operation run by a very capable
leader who rides the airwaves - the 24/7 cable news networks and
conservative talk radio - like a veteran broncobuster. It has outlasted a
number of other religious right groups (think Pat Robertson's Christian
Coalition), and is outpacing the financially troubled, and once mighty,
Focus on the Family.
It is one of the most outspokenly - and outrageously -- anti-gay organizations in the country.
Welcome to the world of Tony Perkins' Family Research Council (FRC),
where the definition of family is circumscribed, and the research is
suspect.
Values Voter Summit and the launching of a Bus Tour
This year's Values Voter Summit is history. The annual Washington
D.C.-based event, organized by the FRC, and sponsored by numerous
right-wing organizations including Donald Wildmon's American Family
Association, was reportedly the best-attended Summit in its history.
The weekend went just about as it always does: a whole lot of bashing
(Obama as usual, and a surprisingly ugly attack on Mormonism; a Rick
Perry-supporting pastor called it a cult); a batch of demonizing (gays);
and Republican Party presidential candidates (except John Huntsman)
tripping over themselves to win the hearts of the attendees (amidst
questions about ballot-stuffing, Ron Paul won the straw poll and Herman
Cain came in second).
Simultaneous to the Summit, the Family Research Council announced
that it was launching a "Values Voter Bus Tour," which "will travel the
country over the next year mobilizing new voters and bringing a message
of real hope and change." According to a an FRC Press Release, the
Values Voter Bus (VVB) will be joined by presidential candidates Rick
Santorum and Michele Bachmann, for events next week in New Hampshire,
and it . "will then travel to the swing states of Ohio and Missouri."
FRC's VVB "will travel through other battleground states, including
North Carolina and Minnesota which have marriage amendments on their
ballots."
'The Anti-Gay Lobby'
Just prior to the convening of the Values Voter Summit, the Southern
Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project issued a report titled "THE
ANTI-GAY LOBBY: The Family Research Council, the American Family
Association & the Demonization of LGBT People" (http://www.lgbtqnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Anti-Gay-Lobby.pdf).
"Together, the Family Research Council (FRC) and the American Family
Association (AFA) may comprise the most important anti-gay lobby in this
country," the report's executive summary states. "Equipped with a $12
million budget and led by [Tony Perkins] a former Louisiana state
representative, the FRC is politically powerful, with its spokesmen
appearing regularly in the national media and many friends on Capitol
Hill. The AFA, a sponsor of the FRC's Values Voter Summit, has a $20
million budget and a network of about 200 radio stations, is regularly
quoted in the press, and has worked to organize grassroots Christians to
lobby for its goals. The FRC and the AFA are certainly among the most
powerful groups on the American religious right."
Amongst the things that tie the FRC and AFA together is their animus towards LBGT people:
"They have both regularly pumped out propaganda asserting that gay
men molest children at far higher rates than their hetero- sexual
counterparts - a claim that has been debunked by virtually all the
recognized scientific authorities in the field. The FRC has claimed that
gay activists 'work to normalize sex with boys,' seek to 'abolish all
age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the
'prophets' of a new sexual order,' and support anti-bullying programs
solely in order to promote homosexuality.
"The AFA has declared that 'homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler ...
the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews,' suggested that gay sex
be punished like heroin use, and said that the 'homosexual agenda'
endangers 'every fundamental right' in the Constitution, including
religious freedom. Both groups have enthusiastically promoted
'reparative therapy,' which claims against the bulk of the evidence that
it can 'cure' gay men and lesbians and make them heterosexual, but in
fact has left a string of people behind who were badly hurt by the
process."
While the FRC and AFA are not the sole proprietors of anti-gay
bashing, they are two organizations that carry great weight within
conservative Christian circles.
"The Family Research Council is a linchpin in the American anti-gay
movement, and one that regularly engages in baseless defamation of LGBT
people," Mark Potok, Director of SPLC's Intelligence Project, said in an
email. "Along with the American Family Association, it makes up the
hard core of the religious right's anti-gay lobby, and like AFA it
regularly poisons the public debate with falsehoods that take us further
away, rather than closer, to solving our collective problems."
Neither the FRC nor the AFA take any responsibility for the alarming
rise in hate crimes against LBGT people. According to an SPLC study
"based on an analysis of 14 years of FBI hate crime data, ... LGBT
people were by far the American minority most victimized by such crimes.
They were more than twice as likely to be attacked in a violent hate
crime as Jews or black people and more than four times as likely as
Muslims. And that doesn't include the anti-gay bullying that has
resulted in so many teen suicides."
Last year, the SPLC began listing the FRC and AFA as "hate groups."
The FRC and AFA earned its listing, not because they are Christian-based
organizations, nor because of their conservative political advocacy.
Rather, they earned the listing because of the "groups use of known
falsehoods to attack and demonize members of the LGBT community."
"Late last year, Perkins complained in full page ads that the SPLC
would not debate the [hate group designation]- in spite of the fact that
he and I had, in fact, debated on national television the very issues
that he claimed we wouldn't debate," Potok added.
"What's more, Perkins claimed that the American College of
Pediatricians had proven that 'homosexuals are bad for children,'
meaning they molest children at disproportionate rates. What he didn't
say was the American College of Pediatricians was not the pediatric
professional association - that would be the American Academy of
Pediatrics, with some 60,000 members. The American College of
Pediatricians, as it happens, is a tiny group that broke away from the
real professional association specifically because it did not believe
that gay parents were good for children.
"Tony Perkins says he is a serious Christian. He should pay more
attention to the commandment that says one should not bear false
witness," said Potok.
The listing of both groups brought forth a deluge of criticism from
religious right organizations. Warren Throckmorton, a professor and past
president of the American Mental Health Counselors Association, found
the SPLC's listing "legitimate and have damaged the credibility of the
groups on the list. Going forward, I hope Christians don't rally around
these groups but rather call them to accountability."
The Family Research Council
Founded in 1983, the Family Research Council became a division of Dr.
James Dobson's Focus on the Family in 1988 and was headed up by Gary
Bauer, a former undersecretary of education under President Ronald
Reagan, and who later became a failed presidential candidate. Although
it separated from FoTF in 1992, "Dobson and two other Focus officials
joined the FRC's newly independent board."
According to "The Anti-Gay Lobby," the non-profit FRC "continued its
work in 'pro-family' areas, working against abortion and stem cell
research, fighting pornography and homosexuality, and promoting 'the
Judeo-Christian worldview as the basis for a just, free, and stable
society.'"
The group's anti-gay thrust was accelerated when Robert Knight, a
long-time conservative writer and journalist, was hired to head up the
organization's cultural affairs department. Knight's anti-gay work
propelled the FRC into the forefront of anti-gay groups. He "penned
anti-gay tracts that used the research of thoroughly discredited
psychologist Paul Cameron, head of the Colorado-based hate group the
Family Research Institute. Knight authored numerous anti-gay papers, and
even used Cameron's infamous 'gay obituary' study in testimony he
offered before Congress to oppose the Employment Non-Discrimination Act
(ENDA) in 1994." Knight also co-authored a 1999 booklet titled Homosexual Activists Work to Normalize Sex with Boys.
(Knight subsequently moved on to Concerned Women for America and now,
according to the report, he is a senior writer as Coral Ridge
Ministries.)
In 1999, Gary Bauer moved on and Ken Connors took his place. Connors
lasted only a short time before the current FRC head, Tony Perkins, took
the helm. Perkins, who controversial past regarding issues of race is
detailed in the SPLC report, helped transform the organization into the
lobbying and financial powerhouse that it is today.
"Under his leadership," the report points out, "the group continues
to peddle its false claims about gays and lesbians and has made
combating the 'homosexual agenda' a seemingly obsessive interest."
Perkins makes regular appearances on the 24/7 cable television new
networks, right wing talk radio, issues a daily "Tony Perkins' FRC
Action Update," partners with Bishop[ Harry Jackson, a virulently
anti-gay African American pastor, to write Personal Faith, Public Policy. He also chairs the Family Research Council Action PAC.
Although Perkins has wandered into the debate over immigration, stem
cell research, Israel, and was a significant player demonizing Michael
Schiavo during the Terri Schiavo affair, he has drawn the organization's
line-in-the-sand over LBGT issues. During a 2005 interview, Americans
United's executive director the Rev. Barry Lynn told me that he had
"worked in Washington a long time, but I've never seen anything as
manipulative as what Perkins and the FRC did over Terri Schiavo. They
took a terminally ill woman and turned her into a political tool to gain
leverage in Congress."
Over the past few years the FRC has: promoted anti-same-sex marriage
initiatives in states across the country; worked to ensure "that the
'Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) policy in the military remained in place,
although it was, in fact, repealed in 2011"; waged a smear campaign
against Kevin Jennings, whom President Obama appointed Assistant Deputy
Secretary at the Department of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug
Free Schools, and Jennings' former organization Gay, Lesbian, and
Straight Education Network (GSLEN).
Perhaps most egregiously, especially when it comes to the well-being
of children, Tony Perkins' Family Research Council continues to insist
that bullying of gay students in the public schools - some cases of
which have led to suicides of gay youth - does not deserve special
attention.
Last year, Perkins' wrote a column in The Washington Post's On Faith
blog that suggested that gay organizations were "exploiting these
tragedies [suicides]": "[s]ome homosexual activist groups lay blame" for
the suicides "at the feet of conservative Christians who teach that
homosexual conduct is wrong .... homosexual activist groups like GLSEN
(the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) are exploiting these
tragedies to push their agenda of demanding not only tolerance of
homosexual individuals, but active affirmation of homosexual conduct and
their efforts to redefine the family."
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