August 21, 2012
Private: Peddlers of Hate Rage Against Those Who Call Them Out
Adam Serwer, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Family Research Council, FRC, Mark Potok, Religious Right, Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC, Tony Perkins
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.
O’Leary most definitely was a bore, and a nasty one at that. As reported for Church & State, O’Leary declared the gay “activists” are liars, gay men cannot sustain happy relationships and that the “underlying goal” of the LGBT community was to destroy Christian values and culture.
Sprigg, then the FRC’s vice president of policy, took a slightly more tactful route, but nonetheless told the audience, “I do, in fact, oppose homosexual behavior, and I think we should discourage it.”
That was only one gathering. But this kind of rhetoric – the LGBT community is morally bankrupt, devious, depraved, and working to destroy the America loved by the Religious Right – has been peddled nonstop for decades.
It is thus not surprising that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights group founded in 1971, that tracks and fights bigotry and hatred, would tag some Religious Right groups, such as the FRC, as a hate group.
What is likely also not surprising is that the FRC and other rightist groups devoted to demonizing the LGBT community would chafe at and try to undermine the work of the SPLC.
When a Virginia man entered FRC’s Washington, D.C. headquarters last week and shot a security guard, it didn’t take long for Perkins, the group’s president, to point the finger. The “reckless rhetoric” from the SPLC, Perkins declared, provided the gunman “a license to shoot” the security guard.
In a piece for Mother Jones, Adam Serwer notes that accusing “someone of purveying ‘hate’ does not contain a justification for violence, explicit or implicit.” And concludes in part, “Given his group’s years-long characterization of gays and lesbians as child-molesting, sociopaths bent on abusing children, I doubt Perkins wants his silly standard for what constitutes a justification of violence to be applied to himself.”
SPLC Senior Fellow Mark Potok, in noting Perkin’s “outrageous” claim, did not back away from SPLC’s conclusion that FRC is a peddler of hatred.
“As the SPLC made clear at the time and in hundreds of subsequent statements and press interviews, we criticize the FRC for claiming, in Perkins’ words, that pedophilia is ‘a homosexual’ problem’ – and utter falsehood, as every relevant scientific authority has stated. An FRC official has said he wanted to ‘export homosexuals from the United States.’ The same official advocated the criminalizing of homosexuality,” Potok said.
But Potok, Serwer and others have it right; FRC shamefully is using a tragedy to divert attention from its ignoble, harmful and yes hateful rhetoric.
[image via Gage Skidmore]