Southern Poverty Law Center

by Jeremy Leaming

For decades, leaders of the nation’s Religious Right have done more than just oppose equality for the LGBT community, they have tarred it as one made of hedonistic, selfish beings bent on harming children, destroying Christianity, and a host of other depraved actions. (For good measure many among the Religious Right have also sought to convince us that science says lesbians and gay men can be “cured” of their alleged afflictions.)

Within the past decade I had the great pleasure of attending numerous Religious Right gatherings in preparing articles for Church & State, a publication of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. At nearly every one of those gatherings lesbians and gay men were a prime topic of conversation. Indeed the leaders of many of the Religious Right groups that appeared at or organized those gatherings, including representatives from James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and Tony Perkin’s (pictured) the Family Research Council (FRC) were obsessed with gay people. It was not enough for these leaders to advance their tired line about the threat same-sex marriages supposedly pose to marriage. They inevitably, whether directly or through insinuation, demonized LGBT people. LGBT persons the Religious Right leaders have long claimed are at the root of everything that is supposedly wrong with this country.

For example at the 2007 “Family Impact Summit” in Tampa, Fla., a string of “workshops” centered squarely on tearing down the LGBT community. Same-sex marriage may have been the hook for some of the discussions, but the conclusions these discussions or lectures advanced were all wildly uniformed, blatantly unfair and bigoted.

A “Homosexuality/Ministry” workshop, as I reported for Church & State, was led by two people who said they had been cured of their homosexuality and featured a talk by Nancy Heche, mother of the actress Anne Heche. Nancy claimed that she had a lot of gay friends, before saying how much she cared for them and how she wished they could have “what I have.” Her condescending talk, given with great earnestness, held that gay people can be made straight and that they’ll be much healthier once they survive the conversion. She urged those in attendance to “eat with the sinners. Go befriend a gay person, build a relationship.” It was a rather nauseating affair.

Unfortunately it did not stop there. A panel discussion called “Defending Marriage: What’s at Stake,” featured FRC’s Peter Sprigg, a longtime and very loud opponent of the LGBT community and Dale O’Leary, who at the time claimed to be a writer for a Catholic-based website, as well as a researcher.

by Jeremy Leaming

Portions of one of the nation’s harshest immigration laws, Alabama’s HB 56, were invalidated today by a federal appeals court, Brian Lyman reports for the Montgomery Advertiser.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, Lyman writes, blocked provisions of the anti-immigrant law that would void contracts involving undocumented workers and bar government officials from “doing business” with undocumented immigrants.

The Eleventh Circuit had been urged by the Alabama officials to wait on issuing any decision on the law until after the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of Arizona’s SB 1070, another harsh immigration law.

The U.S. Department of Justice, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the ACLU and the National Immigration Law Center lodged the lawsuit against Alabama, lambasted nationally for crafting an an over-the-top, even cruel law in a state where less than 4 percent of the population is foreign-born. The lawsuit argued, in part, that Alabama’s law undermines the federal government’s power to implement immigration policy.

Not long after the law’s enactment, The New York Times editorial board said the “drafters of Alabama’s harsh immigration law wanted to turn their state into the country’s most hostile territory for illegal immigrants. They are succeeding, as many of Alabama’s most vulnerable residents can attest.”

The sweeping law encouraged state officials, working at public schools, hospitals and other state institutions to report on people they suspect of being undocumented residents.

Late last month, the SPLC issued a report detailing harassment and discrimination of Latinos in the state following enactment of HB 56, which helped create a “xenophobic climate.” The report details people being “cheated out of wages, being denied medical treatment and facing a growing hostility,” since the law’s passage.