frc bak

see also Perkins

1019 FRC bak

---

05/20/2026

by

Peter Montgomery

At a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol Wednesday morning, Rep. Clay Fuller (R-GA) may have unwittingly revealed a basic truth about recent right-wing attacks on the Southern Poverty Law Center: they are part of a broader authoritarian assault by the Trump regime on civil rights groups and the progressive community, or in Rep. Fuller’s words, “this nonprofit-industrial complex that is seeking to destroy our country each and every day.”

The press conference was a prelude to the House Judiciary Committee hearing in which Republicans accused the SPLC of “manufacturing hate.” Speaking to a handful of right-wing media outlets were representatives of right-wing organizations complaining about having been designated as hate groups or included in extremism reporting by the Southern Poverty Law Center, including the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, Moms for Liberty, Turning Point USA, and Awake Illinois. Joining them was right-wing journalist Tyler O’Neil, author of an anti-SPLC book.

Before the event started, a correspondent for the Real America’s Voice network could be heard falsely telling listeners that SPLC had “staged” the 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a claim commonly heard in right-wing propaganda promoting and going well beyond the claims in the Justice Department’s bogus indictment of the SPLC for using paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups.

Speaking for the Family Research Council was its executive vice president Jerry Boykin, who falsely claimed that SPLC’s hate map is based on “no criteria” except what might help make money for the group. In reality, whether or not you agree with any particular designation SPLC makes, you can find their reasoning on the website—for example, its report on FRC’s demonization of LGBTQ people and more.

While most of the speakers complained that there were dire consequences for being placed on SPLC’s hate map, the representative of TPUSA’s George Washington University chapter was a bit off-message, dismissing it as a “silly little map” and vowing that his group would not be intimidated by the “lunatic left.”

At the hearing itself—the second one focused on the SPLC—Republican members of the Judiciary Committee trotted out expected claims about SPLC’s paid informants being used to “manufacture hate” and to allege that the SPLC smears Christians and “good pro-family organizations,” in Rep. Jim Jordan’s words. Reflecting that level of discourse was Rep. Glenn Grothman, who sighed, “They just hate Christianity, don’t they?” Rep. Michael Baumgartner said he had favorable memories of the SPLC playing a role in helping people in eastern Washington respond to an Aryan Nations compound, but he charged that the group has now become “an almost militant weaponized arm of a progressive Marxist political project.”

Right-wing witnesses also made clear that their goal is broader than taking down a single organization. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins argued that investigations should not stop with the SPLC, which he called a “hub,” but should expand to other organizations and companies that made decisions about groups based on their SPLC designations—the “spokes.” Tyler O’Neil, a reporter at The Daily Signal, which started as the Heritage Foundation’s news and commentary platform, called for a broader investigation of SPLC “and its offshoots,” naming specifically the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which was started by a former SPLC staffer.

Judiciary Committee Democrats, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin, portrayed the DOJ prosecution as outrageous political persecution, in the memorable words of Rep. Lucy McBath, “charges so flimsy they would make Bull Connor and George Wallace blush.”

While Republicans suggested that the SPLC was somehow responsible for the violence in Charlottesville, several Democrats noted that before the Unite the Right rally, the SPLC gave the FBI a 45-page dossier warning that violence could erupt, and that SPLC had also shared information from informants that led to the conviction of members of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division.

Committee Democrats also effectively used some of their time to focus on the scandalous corruption revealed this week: the DOJ’s creation of a nearly two billion dollar slush fund for the president to dole out to insurrectionists and other allies; and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s apparently related agreement in connection to Trump’s bogus lawsuit against the IRS to drop any current audits or investigations and grant a permanent blanket of immunity for any wrongdoing by Trump, his family, or their massive business networks at any time in the past. Rep. Raskin moved for the committee to subpoena administration officials involved in the creation of the slush fund, but Republicans voted to table his motion.

More than one Democratic member of Congress referred to Monday’s shooting at a San Diego mosque, in which teenagers who bonded online over white supremacist hatred killed three people before killing themselves, as evidence that far-right violent extremism deserves more attention from the committee.

Maya Wiley, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, was the witness called by Democrats. She delivered a powerful opening statement calling the campaign against the SPLC part of “a coordinated attack on civil rights non-profits that work to ensure voters can vote, children can learn history, and unions can protect workers,” and she deftly responded to GOP members’ often ridiculous questions. Here’s more from her opening statement:

But this case and today’s hearing aren’t about how to protect people from violent hate and extremist groups or better understand how we can prevent hate and bias. They are about using the powers of prosecution as a weapon, with the sole aim of stopping speech and activities that this administration dislikes and denying the real threats that we should all be concerned about.

In the past year, we have seen countless examples of this weaponization. This administration is coercing law firms, universities, and media companies. It is threatening to brand advocates as “domestic terrorists.” It is cutting off billions in federal grants to non-profits that do important work to track and prevent hate and bias. It is letting law enforcement off the hook for systemic misconduct that violates rights of people who need protection. It is letting violence and even extrajudicial killings by federal agents go unpunished. In all of this and more, the President has not even tried to hide his motives. And for the past year, he has also been open about his willingness to weaponize criminal law. So cases like this were inevitable. And our concern is that no organization seen as dissenting from administration policy, large or small, will ultimately be safe. …

Each year, the SPLC issues a report on hate and extremism in our country. This report is so important because it tracks organizations promoting the ideologies that brought us the Charlottesville riot that left Heather Heyer dead, and the massacres at the Tree of Life synagogue, the Emanuel AME church, and the El Paso Walmart. It is sadly part of the reason SPLC is being targeted. It is uncomfortable for an administration that has backed away from and cut grants for tracking white nationalism, which the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration defined as our greatest domestic threat.

The SPLC is far too busy fighting hate to “manufacture” it. You don’t have to like or agree with all of its strategies for doing so. But the fact that SPLC is now being criminally charged for its work only shows how much more work it has to do.

---

---

rww

12/12/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

• Rep. Chip Roy says that Republicans in the House of Representatives will be holding hearings to expose how George Soros, NGOs, and the United Nations have been using the SPLC and antifa to promote "Marxists and Islamists who want to take this country over."

• "Prophet" Mark Taylor fumes that "Susie Wiles and her people are the ones responsible for single handedly KILLING the America First Agenda!": "She is a demonic infiltrator in the highest order sent in to destroy the President and the America First Agenda."

ref

tony perkins

Rep. Chip Roy Highlights the latest on the Defense Bill & Looks Ahead to 2025 Agenda

0:00

And here we have Texas Congressman Chip

0:02

Roy who has joined us here in the media

0:06

center at the Family Research Council.

0:09

Uh a familiar face and voice on

0:11

Washington watch. Uh Congressman, thanks

0:13

so much for running off the hill and

0:15

coming down here and joining us.

0:16

Happy to do it. Great to be here, Tony.

0:18

So we're coming up on the uh really the

0:20

end of the year. Still a lot hanging out

0:22

there for Congress to deal with. We've

0:24

been talking about the healthcare

0:26

extension. So, so what what can we

0:28

anticipate over the next uh week?

0:31

Well, we just passed the National

0:32

Defense Authorization Act this week. As

0:34

you point out, we've got these issues to

0:36

kind of close out. And, you know, look,

0:37

I'm very bullish about a lot of the

0:39

things we've been able to accomplish in

0:40

terms of the big beautiful bill, tax

0:42

policy, getting work requirements, and

0:43

Medicaid, the stuff that we did there

0:45

that I think will help position the

0:47

economy for next year, which is where we

0:48

need it to be, and be strong heading

0:50

heading into the midterms. But look, I

0:51

I'm one who believes we ought to be on

0:53

offense on healthcare. So, I'm being I'm

0:55

I'm a voice for that. And this whole

0:57

notion of getting wrapped around the

0:58

axle on subsidies is a mistake. Yeah. Uh

1:00

because that's just perpetuating the

1:01

very broken system that has given us the

1:03

inability to afford healthcare. So from

1:05

my standpoint, I'm advocating for what I

1:07

call healthcare freedom, massive

1:09

expansion of health savings accounts,

1:10

direct primary care, access to medicare,

1:13

uh health sharing ministries, all the

1:15

things that we know are actually

1:16

working. And you just got to have some

1:17

catastrophic option and then you know

1:19

free up the American people so you have

1:21

patients and doctors who are empowered

1:23

instead of insurance bureaucrats and

1:24

government bureaucrats. I think we can

1:26

do it, but it's hard to build 218 and

1:29

you know, Mike has been doing

1:30

So, who's opposed to that other than the

1:32

Democrats?

1:33

So, let me say the good news. The good

1:34

news is I've seen greater unonymity on

1:38

that concept that I just laid out than

1:40

I've really seen in years. Like,

1:42

everybody's speaking the same language

1:44

and off the same sheet of music,

1:46

however, there's a pocket of our mods

1:48

who really want something moderates on

1:51

something on the subsidies. I think

1:53

they're getting wrapped around that axle

1:54

wrongly. We're trying to kind of pull

1:56

that off. They really want to vote on

1:57

that because they believe they've got to

1:59

answer that question. I think they're

2:01

putting, you know, uh I think they're

2:02

focusing on the wrong thing, right?

2:04

We got to go focus on what's, you know,

2:05

fundamentally structurally wrong that is

2:08

actually making it totally unaffordable

2:09

for the average hardworking family who

2:11

now have $25,000 of insurance payments

2:13

to get boxed out from the doctor of

2:15

their choice.

2:16

So, are those moderates all in blue

2:17

states?

2:19

Yes, they are.

2:20

Yeah, there might be. Yes. Yes. I mean,

2:22

because the history here, we've talked

2:24

about this. I don't want to beat a dead

2:25

horse, but or a sick horse about

2:27

healthcare, but the the the reality is

2:29

no Republican has ever voted for

2:31

Obamacare nor the subsidies. Correct.

2:33

Why start now?

2:34

Well, we shouldn't and I will get I want

2:36

to give a lot of credit to Speaker

2:38

Johnson who I think has done a a very

2:41

good job navigating a tough climate. And

2:43

look, I've I've had my differences of

2:44

opinion here and there with with

2:46

everybody and we always have that. But

2:48

but uh you know, Mike navigated through

2:49

the shutdown. and he's navigating

2:50

through some of these issues to try to

2:52

focus on the right things. He rightly

2:54

agrees that going down the road of

2:56

subsidies is a mistake for Republicans.

2:58

The president agrees. The president is

3:00

look, the president has opened the door

3:02

when he goes out and says, "Why are we

3:03

subsidizing insurance companies when we

3:05

should be helping the American people?"

3:07

That is the right instinct. The

3:08

president is pointing in the right

3:10

direction. So, if congressional

3:11

Republicans will step up, the president

3:13

will get out and message it and we can

3:15

sell it. But this is what we're all

3:16

wrestling with. We're literally just on

3:18

the House floor a minute ago trying to

3:19

figure out the next steps next week and

3:21

I don't know yet what it's going to be.

3:22

Well, I I would agree with you. I think

3:24

we need to take the opportunity to fix

3:26

the system by replacing it with

3:28

something that works that is that is

3:29

free marketbased p patient focused

3:32

relationship with the doctor, not the

3:34

not the insurance company.

3:36

And by the way, 30 second aside, I I'd

3:38

like to get rid of Obamacare, but you

3:39

know what? You can leave Obamacare in

3:41

place if you provide a freedom option.

3:43

People will go there if you give them

3:45

the ability to have something they can

3:46

afford. It'll work.

3:47

Correct. It'll work. So, fine. You want

3:49

to leave this in place? Fine. But you

3:50

give me a p place to go. Give my family

3:52

a place to go. Give everybody here a

3:54

place to go.

3:54

All right. Talking about uh you you you

3:58

uh you like to be on the offense. You

3:59

like to to to move forward. You don't

4:01

want to just kind of sit. So, let's talk

4:04

about something. You are hosting or

4:06

actually you're chairing, I should say,

4:07

a subcommittee hearing next week. You

4:09

chaired the constitution committee in

4:12

the judiciary committee on the southern

4:14

poverty law center that has in fact when

4:18

you walk out the door of this room you

4:20

will see the bullet holes in the wall

4:21

that was inspired a gunman to come into

4:24

this building. Uh Congress is ready to

4:27

act on that. They're ready to move to

4:29

expose these this long-term relationship

4:32

that SPLC was had has had with

4:34

government agencies.

4:35

Well, I'm certainly ready to do that. I

4:37

think uh Congressman uh and chairman

4:39

Jordan uh rightly agreed that we should

4:42

have this hearing in the subcommittee on

4:43

the Constitution. And so we're going to

4:44

be doing this next week. Uh Tony will be

4:46

one of the witnesses. Uh uh Tyler Boyer

4:49

from TPUSA is going to be one of the

4:51

witnesses. Uh as well as an individual

4:54

who's pretty knowledgeable here in town,

4:55

a journalist named Tyler O'Neal about

4:57

all of the dot connecting of all the

4:59

money. Now, there's a lot to unpack

5:01

here, which we probably don't have

5:02

enough time to do in full, but the short

5:04

version is anybody who loves and is

5:06

familiar with with with F FRC knows what

5:09

Southern Poverty Law Center meant with

5:11

respect to the attack here over a decade

5:12

ago uh here in this building. Um, but

5:16

and now we've seen the connection to

5:18

what happened with Charlie and and the

5:20

extent to which your, you know,

5:21

crosshairs are put on you. Heck, my name

5:23

is now getting put in the crosshairs

5:25

because I'm daring to call out the

5:26

Islamification of America. So what we're

5:29

going to do in this hearing is expose

5:30

that, demonstrate what's actually

5:32

happening, but I want to take that a

5:34

step further so people understand the

5:35

vast array of networks that are funding

5:37

all of it. The Soros operation, uh,

5:40

Arabella, all of the groups and all of

5:42

the operatives that are involved, the

5:43

Islamification funding, the open borders

5:45

groups, the NOS's, the United Nations,

5:48

your taxpayer dollars, all of it coming

5:50

together in this vast network to have a

5:52

red green alliance where you've got the

5:54

Marxists and the Islamists who want to

5:56

take our country over. and it's all

5:58

related and SPLC is right at the center

6:00

of it. Antifa is at the center of it.

6:02

All of these groups need to be exposed

6:04

and we're going to be doing that next

6:05

week and we're just getting started and

6:06

I've had some great conversation with

6:08

Secretary Bessant with people in the

6:09

administration. Um I think there's a

6:11

hunger to go break this network down

6:14

because it's attacking our way of life.

6:15

Well, it's it's

6:18

finninging violence and it's and it's

6:20

it's leading to death. Yep.

6:22

And it's chilling our First Amendment

6:24

freedoms. Chip Roy, always great to see

6:26

you. Thanks so much for joining us. Look

6:27

forward to seeing you next week.

6:28

Absolutely.

---}:

// kirk tpusa ~ crt/ maSK

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/family-research-council-raises-money-for-right-wing-school-board-takeover-campaign/

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/family-research-council-launches-center-for-biblical-worldview/

Moore Says Closing Churches Is ‘Tyranny,’ Tells Pastors They Have Duty to Assemble

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/rise-of-a-shadow-political-party-how-christian-nationalists-worship-power-and-why-they-love-trump/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/rise-of-a-shadow-political-party-how-christian-nationalists-worship-power-and-why-they-love-trump/

no lnx

Rise of a ‘shadow political party’: How Christian nationalists worship power — and why they love Trump

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon March 4, 2020

It’s one of the most enduring conundrums of the Donald Trump era: How is it that the Christian right, the self-appointed monitors of American morality, have come to so enthusiastically back a thrice-married chronic adulterer who lies as easily as he breathes?

Author Katherine Stewart has the answer: Because the true god these folks worship is power. In her book, “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” Stewart details how she traveled around the country, getting to know the various Christian conservative figures that are whipping support for Trump and his agenda. She deems the “Christian nationalists” and demonstrates how their supposedly Christian values always come second to their endless quest for power.

Stewart spoke with Salon about her new book. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

In the intro of the book you write that most Americans view the Christian right as a  “cultural movement centered on a set of social issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage.” But in fact, it’s a political movement and its ultimate goal is power. What do you mean by that?

I think when we think of the religious right, we’re often thinking of a cultural movement or social movement that works from the bottom up, expressing the anxieties and reactions of a particular group in American society to change social realities, focused on issues like reproductive rights or same-sex marriage.But Christian nationalism really works from the top down. It actively shapes and manipulates its target population, and it often shifts its target.

When movement leaders are talking to the congregants or to pastors who speak to congregants, it’s all abortion all the time. The foot soldiers may even believe that they’re fighting for things like a ban on abortion or same-sex marriage, but the leaders have actually consciously reframed these issues in such a way that they can control the vote of a large subsection of the American public. They use that to solidify and maintain political power for themselves and their allies, to increase the flow of public and private money in their direction, and to enact economic policies that are favorable to their funders.

When you dig a little deeper into what the movement leaders talk about when they talk with one another, they actually advocate for a very wide range of policy issues that don’t just have to do with abortion or same-sex marriage. A lot of it has to do with economic policy. A lot of it has to do with foreign policy, social policy. It’s important to look at the movement in this broader fashion as a political movement that wants power.

Tell me more about that. How does someone argue that there’s something Christian about, say, low tax and low regulation?

They say that the Bible favors minimal government or no government. The Bible is against regulation, against the social safety net. Unless the social safety net is managed by the church.

Someone like Ralph Drollinger — who targets political leaders at the top levels of government — he’s got this Bible study group in the Capitol that’s been attended by at least 11 members of Trump’s cabinet, including Mike Pence. He also has Bible study groups targeting the Senate and House of Representatives, and they’re very well-attended. So he’s arguably one of the most politically influential pastors in America.

He argues that social welfare programs have no basis in Scripture. He says that the government should not directly fund needs for the poor. He says the responsibility to meet the needs of the poor lies first with a husband and a marriage, second with a family if the husband is absent, and third with the church. He says nowhere does God command the institutions of government or commerce to fully support those with genuine needs.

These policies are incredibly favorable to the plutocratic fortunes that are funding the movement. The movement wouldn’t be what it is without some subsection of very wealthy individuals and extended families that are supporting the movement financially. I’m thinking of like theDeVos, Prince families, the Green family, and so many others that I described in my book.

These families, in turn, benefit from a deregulation of lack of environmental control regulation, low taxation, and minimal workers’ rights. Drollinger himself derived a lot of his early funding from agribusiness kings, people who own large agribusiness conglomerates in Central Valley,California, and the San Joaquin Valley. So it’s a kind of economic policy that actually is favorable to many of the big-picture funders of the movement.

We also have to recognize that the role of public money is absolutely huge. A lot of the calls for “religious freedom” that characterize much of the activism of the movement today are often seen, rightly so, as a demand that conservative Christians should be able to discriminate against LGBT Americans, nonreligious women and members of the religious minority groups.  But even more than that, activists have their eye on a vast potential flow of public funds in the future. This is one of the reasons why the calls for religious freedom are just like this ever-louder drum beat that we’re hearing in so many places.

This agenda has been made really explicit in the field of public educationwhere activists are determined to expand access to public funds in the form of vouchers. They’ve actually placed a key voucher case before the Supreme Court, which they hope will allow a greater funnel of funds in their direction.

The United States spends something like $700 billion a year on K-12. So Christian nationalists realize that, if they can get their hands on a small portion of that in the name of religious liberty, the money will flow without end. So when you look at the larger demands of the movement, it’s not just about these culture war issues, it’s about public policy, foreign policy, and it’s about money.

You call it a Christian nationalist movement, not a white nationalist movement, not the Christian right even. Why do you call it a Christian nationalist movement?

Christian nationalism is a political ideology. It says that what makes the United States distinctive is not our democratic system of government, or our Constitution, or our history of assimilating diverse people in a pluralist society. Instead, it insists that the foundation of legitimate government is bound up inextricably with the reactionary understanding of a particular religion. It basically says that the U.S. was founded on the Bible, and can only succeed if it stays true to that foundation.

It’s also not just an ideology, but a device for mobilizing and often manipulating large segments of the population and for concentrating power in the hands of this new elite. Vladimir Putin in Russia, or Viktor Orban in Hungary, or Erdogan in Turkey tie themselves closely to religious conservatives in their countries, to consolidate an authoritarian form of power. We’re seeing this today with Trump’s alliances, with our own religious conservatives.

You write that America’s conservative churches have been converted into “loyal cells of a shadow political party.” What do you mean by that?

Leaders of the movement have figured out that pastors drive votes, and so they organize pastors into these networks, to get them on the same page politically.They give themtools through networks of conservative churchesin order to do that, to help them turn out votes for hyper-conservative candidates.

Recently, I found myself at a small church in rural North Carolina, with dozens of evangelical pastors from the area. I was at an event sponsored by an organization called Watchmen on the Wall, which is an initiative of the Family Research Council, which is one of the largest and most powerful policy groups of the Christian right.

Watchmen on the Wall claims to have over 25,000 pastor members. They get all these pastors networked together, and they have these presentations where they tell them what issues matter and how to turn out the vote on these “biblical issues.” There wasn’t a slightest doubt about which way these pastors were expected to tell their congregations to vote.

They were instructed to form what they call culture impact teamswithin their churches. They have to figure out which members of their congregation are politically active, well-connected with other members, and motivated to get them to vote according to “biblical values.” They gave these pastors these booklets, 200 pages of material that help them form these culture impact teams.

They actually give them tools to get them out to vote. They give them tens of thousands of voter guides, and pastors were encouraged to take as many as they could use and hand out.

Your chapter on the anti-abortion movement in the book is titled “Inventing Abortion.” You write that it’s a myth that the movement was a reaction to a sincere belief in protecting fetal life. Tell me more. What is this Christian right obsession with abortion? Where does it come from? What is it actually about?

When Roe v. Wade was passed, the liberalization of abortion laws was something that many, if not most, Republican partisans supported. The early battles over abortion tended to be between Catholics and Protestants, with Protestants largely on the side of liberalization of abortion laws. Even though Catholic hierarchy is opposed to abortion, many Catholic individuals supported some form of liberalization based on sort of lived experience.

At that time that Roe v. Wade passed, the abortion law reform really conformed with the Republican party’s support for Protestant values, birth control. Billy Graham in 1968 said, “In general, I would disagree with the Catholic stance. I believe in Planned Parenthood.”

The most liberal abortion law in the country was signed in 1967 by California’s Republican governor, Ronald Reagan. Barry Goldwater, who is this great conservative hero, supported abortion law liberalization early in his career. His wife, Peggy, was a co-founder of Planned Parenthood in Arizona.

When Roe v. Wade passed, in fact, there was a wire service run by the Southern Baptist Convention. The bureau chief of the Baptist Press wrote a piece saying that religious liberty, human equality, and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court decision.

This was not an issue that united the Republican party at all, until activists from the new right got involved and were really searching for an issue that could unite the party.

At the time, they’d come together out of concern that institutions like Bob Jones University would be deprived of their lucrative tax advantage. But they knew that preserving tax advantages for racially segregated academies is not going to be an issue that could really unite the party. So they kind of looked around for an issue that could unite conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants.

Bit by bit, they settled on abortion and sort of purged the Republican party of its pro-choice representatives. They needed a single issue that they could get people to vote on, and abortion became that issue.

Let’s talk about Donald Trump. He’s obviously not a religious man. He knows little of Christian theology. He can’t even get the terminology right. He can’t really even be bothered to pretend otherwise. So how is a man like that such a hero to the Christian nationalists?

First, the movement realizes that much of their agenda is advanced through the courts and he’s delivering them everything that he promised.

I was at a Road To Majority conference, that’s Ralph Reed’s conference, right before the election. Trump held up a list of justices and he said, “I’m going to choose Supreme Court justices from this list,” and every single one of them was pro-life. Of course, the issue wasn’t just abortion, but abortion becomes code for the entire agenda.

There’s that transactional side of it. But I think that there’s another side too. Trump’s anti-democratic attributes are a vital part of his attraction for this movement.

This movement doesn’t really believe in modern representative democracy. At bottom, they sound as though they prefer autocrats. In fact, what they really want is a king. Paula White is always calling Trump a king. Ralph Drollinger is always talking about kinging and kings. Trump has been referred to as King Cyrus.

The thing about kings like Cyrus is that they don’t have to follow the rules. They are the law. Trump understands this longing for the hard hand of the despot. That is what has made him such an attractive leader to this movement.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/hallmark-movies-are-the-most-insidious-authoritarian-propaganda-heres-how/

no lnx

Hallmark movies are the most insidious authoritarian propaganda — here’s how

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon December 26, 2019

The Hallmark Channel has been having a rough go of it in the past few weeks. The cable TV behemoth, which has been minting money with its patented holiday season schmaltz, drew widespread criticism earlier this month when it pulled ads for the wedding company Zola that featured a lesbian couple kissing at their wedding. The company’s initial excuse was that they do not allow ads that feature “overt public displays of affection,” claiming the policy is “regardless of the participants.”

This was, obviously, nonsense, as couples kissing at weddings is not only not outré, but generally seen as mandatory (and features in the channel’s numerous rom-coms).Unsurprisingly, critics quickly found plenty of examples of straight snogging on the channel that shows that sexual orientation was the sole reason for the ad pull. (That, and Hallmark was clearly responding to a right-wing pressure campaign claiming that lesbian kissing “ruined” the channel’s “family friendly” offerings.) Hallmark then flip-flopped, apologizing for pulling the ads and claiming they have been “a progressive pioneer on television for decades” and “committed to diversity and inclusion.”

Which is, of course, laughable to anyone who has even glancing knowledge of the channel’s offerings. Running down this year’s schedule of Christmas movie offerings is like a trip into an uncanny valley of shiny-teethed, blow-dried heteronormative whiteness, with only a few token movies with characters of color. It’s like watching “The Stepford Wives,” but scarier, since the evil plot to replace normal people with robots is never actually revealed.

None of this should be a surprise, because Hallmark movies, as cloying and saccharine as they are, constitute the platonic ideal of fascist propaganda.

That is probably a startling statement to some. When most of us think about fascistically propagandistic movies, we think of the grotesque grandeur of Leni Riefenstahl’s films celebrating the Third Reich — grand, but cold sweeping shots of soldiers goose-stepping and flags waving, all meant to inspire awe and terror. But the reality is, even in Nazi Germany, the majority of movies approved by the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, were escapist and feather-light, with a Hallmark movie-style emphasis on the importance of “normality.”

There’s plenty of reason that empty-headed kitsch fits neatly in the authoritarian worldview. It’s storytelling that imitates the gestures of emotion without actually engaging with real feeling. The Hallmark movie steers clear of the real passion or deeper emotion that tends to be the engine driving more artful fiction. Characters who have real feelings, after all, can prompt empathetic reactions in the audience, and empathy for others is the greatest single threat to the authoritarian mindset. And so schmaltz walks through the paces of “love” without touching on any of the messy but compelling realities of it.

Instead of characters driven by real feelings, therefore, the guiding hand of “normalcy” pulls the characters along through narratives — and unsurprisingly, that idea of “normalcy” doesn’t have a lot of room for the true diversity of American experiences.

This much is evident in the efforts to include Jewish characters in recent Hallmark holiday movies which, by all accounts, seems like a complete disaster — in part because the rule of “normalcy” reorients everything towards a very narrow, sentimentalized version of Christmas.

“In the Hallmark-Lifetime Cinematic Universe, Hanukkah and the characters who celebrate it exist only in relation to Christmas,” Nancy Coleman of th New York Times complained, adding that the Hallmark movie “Holiday Date” could, with “remarkably little editing” turn into “a Jewish ‘Get Out.'”

Britni de la Cretaz, writing for the Washington Post, not only complained that the Jewish Hallmark movies were “Christmas movies with Jewish characters,” but also that the movies “rely on some of the oldest anti-Semitic tropes in the book,” such as painting one Jewish character as the “perpetual outsider” who is “sneaky, untrustworthy.”

“The drama hinges on Jewish characters being compelled to observe Christmas, and the tension resolves only when these outsiders learn how to participate in or appreciate the dominant religious tradition,” she adds.

Sadly, it’s hard to imagine it being any other way. The qualities that people cite when they defend Hallmark movies — comforting, formulaic, soothing — are all a result of the aggressively conformist impulse that drives them. And that impulse and fealty to the dominant culture stands in direct contrast to the values of diversity Hallmark facetiously claims to hold.

Hallmark movies, with their emphasis on returning home and the pleasures of the small, domestic life, also send a not-at-all subtle signal of disdain for cosmopolitanism and curiosity about the larger world, which is exactly the sort of attitude that helps breed the kind of defensive white nationalism that we see growing in strength in the Donald Trump era.

If you don’t believe me, listen to authoritarians themselves. At the Federalist, which is ground zero website for generating frankly fascist “culture war” arguments, Hans Fiene argues that, “culturally speaking, Hallmark Christmas movies are noticeably Christian.”

By this, Fiene isn’t talking about characters who actually go to church or pray — even self-identified conservative Christians don’t want to see that — but a set of patriarchal and authoritarian values that are more about white evangelicals defining themselves as an ethnic group, and not about a genuine feeling of spirituality.

The movies always depict a “heroine who begins the story loving her self-involved life in the city chooses family and a life of self-sacrifice in her hometown,” he writes, arguing that it’s the “last remaining hideout” for those who want a fantasy of a world where “the cynicism and immorality of modern life aren’t allowed.” By “cynicism and immmorality,” Fiene explains he’s talking about “fornication” and acceptance of “sexual deviants,” by which he means LGBTQ people.

None of this, of course, means that everyone who watches Hallmark Christmas movies is some kind of fledgling fascist. These movies are not for me, but I believe people when they say they find it relaxing to watch these predictable movies that have low stakes because none of the characters feel like real people. I’ve got my own flavors of trashy entertainment I fully enjoy without mistaking it for high art. (Baby Yoda, what’s up?)

Still, it’s critical to be mindful of the role that Hallmark movies are actually playing in our society. The very fact that they’re presented as harmless fluff makes it all the more insidious, the way they work to enforce very narrow, white, heteronormative, sexist, provincial ideas of what constitutes “normal.”

It’s easy to spot fascist propaganda when it’s goose-stepping Pepe-the-frog memes. It’s a lot harder to notice how it’s working when it’s tied up in Christmas cheer and suggesting grinchhood of anyone who questions the rigidity of its worldview.

As University of Richmond communications professor Nicole Maurantonio wrote in a recent piece exposing the sneakily racist propaganda of Confederate-themed Christmas ornaments, “seemingly apolitical objects like cookbooks, toys and Christmas ornaments commemorating Confederate history serve to normalize,” and in doing so, make white supremacy seem less harmful than it actually is.

Ultimately, there’s a reason that authoritarian religious right groups like One Million Moms and American Family Association — who made the initial demands on Hallmark to end the lesbian-inclusive ads —  believe that the Hallmark Channel “belongs” to them.They may use euphemisms like “family friendly,” but as there is nothing more family friendly than light PDAs from loving couples at weddings, we can say for certain that is not what bothers them. Instead, it’s because they believe Hallmark is “safe” because it excludes people who don’t fit their extremely rigid ideas about what constitutes “normal.”

“So many people feel betrayed because this is one of the very last channels that families could go to and not be bombarded with politically correct commercials and the LGBTQ agenda,” the American Family Association griped in a press release.

Note that the language is solely that of exclusion. This isn’t about Christian conservatives wanting more Hallmark movies that show characters who actually go to church or anything like that. What makes something “family friendly” and “Christian” is who is not allowed inside the fantasy land of impossibly expensive rural houses and women who are realizing that they wanted to just get married to the boy next door all along.

Ultimately, there is probably no way to square the claim to believe in “diversity” with fascistic impulse that guides the current crop of Hallmark movies, which center always around these frankly MAGA-style ideas about what constitutes “real” America. As the Jewish movies show, the best that Hallmark can do is some token “diversity” that wipes out most of what makes people actually diverse.  Their money comes from selling a vision of America that increasingly authoritarian conservatives wish to believe once existed and can be restored again — an America that excludes most of an increasingly urban, racially diverse,  cosmopolitan nation. That won’t change no matter how many inclusive Zola ads the network airs.

Amanda Marcotte is a politics writer for Salon. Her new book, “Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself,” is out now. She’s on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/dozens-of-christian-advocacy-groups-urge-trump-to-reverse-decision-to-abandon-christians-yazidis-and-kurds-in-syria/

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Dozens of Christian advocacy groups urge Trump to reverse decision to abandon Christians, Yazidis and Kurds in Syria

Written by Lincoln Green / Daily Kos October 13, 2019

In “Advocates to Trump: Don’t desert Christians, Yazidis, Kurds in Syria”, Dave Gavlak reports in theNational Catholic Reporter that dozens of Christian advocacy groups, led by the Protestant fundamentalist Family Research Council and the religious-freedom group Law and Liberty Trust, issued a letter to President Trump yesterday asking him to reverse his October 6 greenlighting of Turkey’s invasion of Syria. Under the umbrella of the International Religious Freedom Roundtable, the letter says that Trump’s decision to let Turkey invade the Self-Administration of Northeastern Syria (SANES) “was deeply shocking to us as advocates for international religious freedom.” The letter goes on to say:

Turkey’s plans are clear: exterminate the entire SDF (our military allies), drive current residents out, and replace them. Just like Afrin in 2018, it will commit genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against women, seize homes and businesses, impose Islamist rule. Christians are specifically targeted for slaughter, not protection.

Turkish president Erdogan has promised to move two million Sunni Muslim Syrian refugees into SANES, displacing Syriac Christians, Yazidis and Kurds who are native to the region, and repeating Turkey’s successful ethnic cleansing of Syria’s Afrin region last year.Before the 2018 invasion, reports Paul Idon of Arab News in “Why Erdogan wants to remake northeast Syria’s demographics”,  “Afrin stood out as an oasis of stability that had welcomed displaced Syrians regardless of ethnicity from across the war-weary country.” After the invasion, Turkish-supported forces engaged in what Amnesty International called “arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, and confiscation of property and looting to which Turkey’s armed forces have turned a blind eye” to replace the Kurdish native population with displaced Syrians allied with Turkey. Kurdish journalist Mohammed Salih, told Idon:

Erdogan and his Syrian jihadi proxies are planning and interested in nothing less than ethnic cleansing of not only the Kurdish people in northeast Syria, but based on what we’ve seen in Afrin, of Christian and Yazidi populations there as well.

In an interview  (in Italian) by Daniel Rocchi of the SIR news agency and reported by Gavlak, the Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop Jean-Clément Jeanbart of Aleppo, Syria, said that the Turkish invasion has “the risk of a real massacre with many innocent deaths”. Lauren Homer, an Anglican religious-freedom lawyer who heads the Law and Liberty Trust, said:

Instead of being on the brink of peace with much of Western and Eastern Syria stabilized, this will energize militant Islamists across Syria and Iraq.

In related news, Marty Johnson reports in The Hill that Trump’s political allies and satraps will appear in force in Sunday’s news shows, to try to do damage control over Trump’s greenlighting of the Turkish invasion. Defense Secretary Mark Esper will likely repeat his assertion that the US has not abandoned our Kurdish allies, even as the Turkish invasion seizes more towns from the Kurds. Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paulare also scheduled to appear. No representatives of Christian, Yazidi, or Kurdish groups have been invited.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/democratic-strategist-says-extreme-right-wing-evangelical-christians-made-deal

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trumps-religious-right-team-schemes-to-legally-erase-trans-identity

New York Times reported on Sunday that the Trump administration is considering a proposal by one of the administration’s highest-ranking Religious Right activists to virtually erase transgender people from legal recognition and protection by the federal government. The memoproposing the change is just the latest indication of just how completely the Religious Right has come to dominate policy-making in the administration of Donald Trump.

The push by the Department of Health and Human Services to impose a trans-denying definition of “sex” onto federal civil rights law “would essentially eradicate federal recognition” of an estimated 1.4 million transgender Americans, according to the Times story.

The effort is being led by Roger Severino, who has taken the anti-LGBT agenda of his former employer, the Heritage Foundation, into the Trump administration as director of the civil rights division at HHS.When he was named to that position, a dozen U.S. senators objected, citing Severino’s “long history of making bigoted statements toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and attacking women’s access to health care services and reproductive rights.”

One of Severino’s former colleagues at the Heritage Foundation, Ryan Anderson, is at the forefront of the Religious Right’s anti-trans crusade. Anderson’s latest book is “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.” Anderson argues that gender cannot be severed from biological sex, and that “taking our sexual embodiment seriously in public policy is not discriminatory.”

That language is strikingly similar to Anderson’s approach to sexual orientation, suggesting that if Religious Right activists in the Trump administration are successful in wiping out legal recognition based on gender identity, they may be willing to try the same with regard to sexual orientation.

Anderson is not a conservative willing to seek “compromise” in the form of religious exemptions to non-discrimination laws. He says that “sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) laws” are “bad public policy” and argues against legal protection for LGBTQ people from discrimination:

Sexual orientation and gender identity refers not only to thoughts and inclinations, but also to behavior, and it is reasonable for citizens to make distinctions based on actions. However, SOGI laws would prohibit reasonable decisions made in response to behaviors that are fraught with moral weight.

Indeed, Religious Right groups like the Family Research Council, which has also placed staff in positions in the Trump administration, deny the very existence of gay identity as well as transgender identity.

The Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg argues that the idea of a gay identity is “empirically false” and urges religious conservatives not to use terms like gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, preferring constructs like “people who engage in homosexual conduct” or “people who identify as homosexual.” This echoes the practice of the Catholic and Mormon hierarchies, which use terms such as “people with same-sex attractions.” Sprigg and FRC similarly argue that transgender identity is “an objective falsehood—which no law should force others to affirm.”

Sprigg was one of the speakers in a session on “gender ideology” at the World Congress of Families global summit held in Moldova in September. His talking points included a denial that discrimination on the basis of gender identity is a form of sex discrimination. The session was moderated by Australian Patrick Byrne, author of a new book, “Transgender: One Shade of Gray.” Byrne said that laws against anti-trans discrimination are “authoritarian” and said the solution is to write the definition of man and woman into law, saying, “if you do that, you block the whole agenda.” That is precisely what Severino seems to be trying to accomplish via executive action.

The National Center for Transgender Equality denounced the “terrifying memo” being circulated within the Trump administration, calling it “a direct attack on trans people.” But Severino cannot unilaterally reverse federal court precedents, noted NCTE:

You should know that this rule will not eliminate the precedents set by dozens of federal courts over the last two decades affirming the full rights and identities of transgender people. It will not undo the consensus of the medical providers and scientists across the globe who see transgender people, know transgender people, and urge everyone to accept us for who we are. And no rule—no administration—can erase the experiences of transgender people and our families.

As a presidential candidate, Trump once held up a rainbow flag, and some of his apologists claimed that he would be the most pro-gay president ever. In truth, the anti-LGBTQ writing was on the wall once Trump decided that his route to the White House depended on a strategic alliance with the Religious Right. In return for his promises to give them the Supreme Court of their dreams and make them more politically powerful by removing legal restrictions on politicking by churches, Religious Right leaders helped generate a massive pro-Trump vote among white evangelicals. Since his election Trump has been returning the favor, giving the Religious Right whatever it wants, and reversing Obama administration pro-LGBTQ policies. In return, religious conservatives have remained his most ferocious defenders, regularly denouncing his opponents as evil, even Satanic.

Tags: Roger Severino Ryan AndersonAnti-GayAnti-LGBTtransgender rightsTrump Administration

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/05/09/christian-right-groups-wage-crusade-capture-courts/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=5c5ed87e-0075-4ed8-aad0-19dc7ba0c82b

big-budget religious-right organizations are waging a sustained crusade to advance their controversial social agenda by rigging the rules in state courts, according to a new report released by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).

Ten of the largest groups with a combined annual budget of more than $220 million have spent millions over the past decade to mount a relentless attack on traditional safeguards designed to insulate judges from politics, including merit selection, campaign finance laws, and judicial codes of conduct that limit what judges can say about legal issues likely to come before their courts.

The Christian right groups oppose same-sex marriage and adoption rights, promote gay conversion therapy, oppose reproductive rights, and fight for broad religious exemptions. Some have been classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Emboldened by the successful ousting of three state Supreme Court justices in Iowa in 2010, as retaliation for the Court’s unanimous decision overturning a ban on same-sex marriage, those conservative religious groups have used legal challenges, legislation, and dark-money election spending in more than a dozen states to politicize state courts.

Religious Right Assaults on Judicial Indipendence

“All courts are under attack by conservative warriors,” said Arn Pearson, CMD’s executive director and the report’s author. “But since Iowa, those most at risk are in the states.”

“The organized Christian right thinks judges should be accountable to ‘values’ voters, and does not believe in the separation of church and state,” Pearson said.

While the religious right has not been able to replicate its Iowa rout, it has successfully teamed up with corporate and partisan players to abolish merit selection in Tennessee, win a conservative majority on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, and mount a major 2016 challenge against four Kansas Supreme Court justices based on their rulings on abortion, the death penalty, and school funding.

Those efforts have been bolstered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, which allowed corporations–including nonprofits–to pour money into judicial elections for the first time in more than a century.

“The influence of big money–already pervasive in federal and state elections–increasingly casts a shadow over how state judges handle controversial cases concerning equal marriage or privacy rights,” Pearson said. “Million-dollar-plus campaigns against sitting judges have become the new normal and can intimidate judges, who are supposed to be neutral arbiters of the law, even when unsuccessful.”

Outside spending on state supreme court elections has more than tripled since 2010, reaching a record $28 million in the 2015-16 judicial elections.

Outside Spending in Supreme Court

Citizens United and many of the state attacks on judicial independence have been masterminded by James Bopp, an Indiana attorney and GOP insider who has represented groups like Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, National Organization for Marriage, and National Right to Life.

Focus on the Family and its advocacy partner, the Family Policy Alliance, have been major players in that effort. The groups spent a combined $93 million in 2016 and funneled nearly $7 million to a network of local partners in 38 states between 2012 and 2015.

Focus on the Family recently declared itself a church and announced that it will no longer file informational tax returns with the IRS.

“The religious right wants to win ‘Christ-centered’ courts that reflect their extreme religious views, and they will continue to wage a series of small battles until they get there,” Pearson said. “Ensuring that courts will protect the constitutional and civil rights of all Americans, regardless of their religious views, will take an equal commitment from supporters of an independent judiciary.”

Read the report: Conquering the Courts

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/right-wing-ramps-up-campaign-against-southern-poverty-law-center

Religious Right groups and right-wing media outlets are waging an intensified campaign against the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based organization that monitors and challenges extremist groups and hateful rhetoric. The latest salvo comes in the form of an open letter to the media written by the Family Research Council and Media Research Center and signed by 47 right-wing leaders and organizations. The letter characterizes the SPLC as “an attack dog of the political left” and urges media outlets to stop using SPLC data, lists and maps.

Religious Right groups have been furious at the SPLC since the organization decided several years ago to begin listing some of them as anti-LGBTQ hate groups. Religious Right groups rallied around the Family Research Council when the SPLC labeled it a hate group in 2010. Religious Right leaders complain that they are designated as hate groups simply for upholding “traditional” Christian teaching about marriage and sexuality, which the SPLC has repeatedly explained is not true.

“Viewing homosexuality as unbiblical does not qualify organizations for listing as hate groups,” the SPLC has explained, saying groups receive the designation for spreading “demonstrably false information” and “disparaging, emotion-provoking stereotypes.” SPLC notes that many Religious Right leaders “have disseminated disparaging ‘facts’ about gay that are simply untrue—assertions that are remarkably reminiscent of the way white intellectuals and scientists once wrote about the ‘bestial’ black man and his supposedly threatening sexuality.”

Two years ago, for example, SPLC’s Mark Potok told a reporter profiling Liberty Counsel, “A group that regularly portrays gay people as perverse diseased pedophiles putting Western civilization at risk are way, way over the line.”

The most recent concerted campaign against the SPLC seems to have been triggered when GuideStar, an online resource that compiles financial and other information about nonprofit organizations, began flagging organizations categorized by the SPLC as hate groups. More than 40 right-wing leaders, including representatives of anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigration and anti-Muslim groups, complained and asked GuideStar to stop using SPLC information. GuideStar reported that its staff members had received death threats over the designations. After a torrent of right-wing complaints, GuideStar removed the banners, but in June Liberty Counsel sued them anyway.

Then in July, right-wing groups, led by the Family Research Council, launched a renewed coordinated campaign targeting the SPLC, which has been amplified by the right-wing media. Even white nationalists have gotten in on the act, with VDARE calling it the “Southern Poverty Lie Center.”

As part of the new campaign, D. James Kennedy Ministries produced an anti-SPLC video called“**Profit$ of Hate.**” Among the Religious Right figures featured in the nearly 30-minute video are FRC’s Tony Perkins, Jerry Boykin, Peter Sprigg andKen Blackwell and Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver.A spokesperson for the group told the Christian Post they made the film because the SPLC poses “significant existential threats to religious freedom and to Christian ministries like ours.”

Then in August, D. James Kennedy Ministries filed its own lawsuit against the SPLC, GuideStar and Amazon, which has not included the ministry in its Amazon Smile fundraising program. The lawsuit charges defamation, trafficking in false or misleading information, and religious discrimination. Here’s how the complaint explains the religious discrimination charge:

Because the ministry’s position on ‘LGBTQ’ issues is inextricably intertwined and connected to the ministry’s religious theology, and because SPLC and GuideStar have declared the ministry to be a hate group due to the ministry’s stand on LGBTQ issues, what occurred here is that SPLC and GuideStar have discriminated against the ministry because of its theology and its religious beliefs.

Lawsuits over the SPLC’s “hate group” designation have been accompanied by a media and messaging barrage, enlisting participation from evangelist Franklin Graham, Fox News Radio personality Todd Starnes, Breitbart, PJ Media, the Drudge Report, Alex Jones, and Western Journalism, which published a piece calling the SPLC a hate group that “burns crosses in its own way.”

SPLC’s detractors also complained when media outlets turned to the group for its widely acknowledged expertise on extremist groups in the U.S. after the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, which resulted in high-profile gifts to the SPLC from corporations like Apple and individuals like George Clooney. Anti-LGBTQ activist Peter LaBarbera, for example, slammed CNN for using the SPLC’s “hate map” in a story; so did the American Family Association’s Tim Wildmon.

Earlier in the summer, the Alliance Defending Freedom complained that ABC and NBC had used SPLC “hate group” criteria in news stories about Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaking to the group. When, in the wake of white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, the Arizona Republic and a Phoenix television station noted ADF’s inclusion on the SPLC’s list, ADF accused the outlets of “journalistic malpractice.”

The campaign also targets corporations that have donated to the SPLC. The right-wing platform 2ndVote calls the Kennedy Ministries’ lawsuit “a first step to defunding SPLC” and suggests that consumers could take action against SPLC funders. Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver even said the SPLC labeling his organization a hate group is part of a persecution of Christians in America reminiscent of the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany.

The Right’s anti-SPLC campaign is not marked by intellectual consistency; right-wing leaders have frequently charged that the “hate” label recklessly incites hatred and invites violence. But then they apply the very same label to the SPLC, as the American Family Association did on August 25, calling the SPLC “the most dangerous hate group in America.” Western Journalism’s article warned that if your policy positions don’t match with the SPLC’s, “you are sued, silenced and threatened,” which of course is exactly what the Right is doing, or trying to do, to the SPLC.

The Family Research Council has included a stream of anti-SPLC criticism in its Twitter feed and email alerts, along with criticism of companies that donated to the group in the wake of white supremacist violence in Charlottesville. FRC’s Jerry Boykin cheered the Kennedy Ministries lawsuit, saying the SPLC is guilty of “inciting hatred against Christians.” Boykin went on Liberty Counsel’s radio show and told people to demand that their members of Congress “get engaged in stopping the reckless behavior of the SPLC.” It’s not clear what Boykin thinks Congress can or should do to the group.

Anti-immigration organizations have been waging their own campaign against the SPLC since last November. FAIR, an anti-immigration group with historical ties to white nationalists, has joined with other anti-immigration groups to launch a website under the name Stop Politicizing Legitimate Causesadopting the Southern Poverty Law Center’s acronym. The fake “SPLC” appears to have placed search-term ads designed to ensnare people seeking information on hate groups. It also mimicked the Center’s Hatewatch and Hate Map projects with its own “Greatwatch” and “Great Map,” which includes a few natural and historical sites, along with FAIR’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. The site asks people to report a “mislabeled organization or a hate incident.”

SPLC’s opponents blame the group for a 2012 shooting at the Family Research Council that was carried out by a man who said he had chosen the group based on its designation as an anti-gay hate group. Gay rights activists and other progressive leaders immediately and unequivocally denounced the violence, which FRC quickly moved to exploit in an effort to damage the SPLC. Right-wing groups have also blamed the SPLC for this year’s shooting at a congressional softball team practice because the shooter had reportedly liked the SPLC’s Facebook page.

The SPLC initially made a name for itself targeting violent racist groups like the KKK and anti-government “patriot” and “militia” groups. Even some right-wing groups acknowledge the value of the SPLC’s work on those fronts, but they say the SPLC’s focus on them unfairly equates their organizations with groups like the KKK.

Some fair-minded people may disagree with the criteria the SPLC uses or the decisions it makes about categorizing individual organizations and leaders. But as RWW’s own reporting on many of the organizations now attacking the SPLC makes clear, there is no question that groups on its list do, in fact, promote harmful stereotypes and inflammatory falsehoods about targeted groups, including LGBTQ people, immigrants, and Muslims. In addition to false and damaging rhetoric at home, Religious Right leaders are making life more difficult and dangerous for LGBTQ people around the globe by supporting laws that criminalize homosexuality and resisting international efforts to recognize and protect the human rights of LGBTQ people and their families.

Right-wing groups have been invigorated by the campaign, election, and presidency of Donald Trump, and they are apparently feeling emboldened by the most favorable political climate they have enjoyed in years. Now they’re taking a page from the Trump playbook and aggressively attacking those who criticize and report on them.

Signers of the anti-SPLC letter released today include a who’s who among Religious Right peddlers of division and bigotry. Among the signers: the MRC’s Brent Bozell; the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and Jerry Boykin; the American Family Association’s Tim Wildmon and Sandy Rios; anti-Islam activists Frank Gaffney, Brigitte Gabriel, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer; Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver; ADF’s Michael Farris; WND’s Joseph Farah; C-FAM’s Austin Ruse; and more.

Tags: Austin RuseBrent BozellBrigitte GabrielFrank GaffneyJeff SessionsJerry BoykinJoseph FarahKen BlackwellMat StaverPamela GellerPeter LaBarberaPeter SpriggRobert SpencerSandy RiosTim WildmonTony PerkinsAnti-Gayanti-immigrantAnti-LGBTAnti-MuslimAlliance Defending FreedomAmerican Family AssociationC-FAMFAIRFamily Research CouncilLiberty CounselMedia Research CenterWorldNetDaily

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https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/07/19/white-nationalist-website-joins-other-hate-groups-smear-campaign-against-splc/217312

VDARE.com, which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has described as a “white nationalist” and “anti-immigration hate website,” has joined other hate groups in an official smear campaign against SPLC launched by anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council (FRC).

FRC and other organizations that SPLC has labeled hate groups launched a campaign on July 17 accusing SPLC of “fueling hate, killing free speech and even encouraging terrorist-style attacks on those it doesn’t agree with,” as the Washington Examinerdescribed it. The campaign included a “planned Monday tweetstorm” and the suggestion that its supporters use the hashtag “#SPLCexposed.”

FRC and other hate groups have repeatedly pushed the myth that SPLC labels as “hate groups” those organizations that it “simply disagree[s] with.” In fact, SPLC has more extensive criteria for the distinction. It designates anti-LGBTQ hate groups as such when they knowingly spread “demonizing lies about the LGBT community,” engage in “baseless, incendiary name-calling,” or actively work to criminalize LGBTQ people. Regarding anti-immigrant groups, SPLC wrote that though “many groups criticize high levels of immigration and some … typically confront or harass individual immigrants and their supporters, anti-immigrant hate groups generally go further by pushing racist propaganda.” It continued that most anti-immigrant hate groups “subscribe to one of two conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact,” including that Mexico is trying to “‘reconquer’ the American Southwest” and that “Mexico, Canada and the United States are secretly planning to merge into a European Union-like entity.” SPLC also clearly defines its anti-Muslim hate group label, noting that these groups “hold conspiratorial views regarding the inherent danger to America by its Muslim-American community” and view Muslims as “intent on undermining and eventually replacing American democracy and Western civilization with Islamic despotism.”

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White nationalist hate website VDARE joined FRC’s campaign on July 18, tweeting the #SPLCexposed hashtag alongside an accompanying article from the site that called SPLC the “Southern Poverty Lie … Center” and touted the #SPLCexposed Twitter campaign. The article also attempted to cast doubt on the reasoning behind SPLC’s designation of anti-immigrant hate group Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

According to SPLC, VDARE, founded in 1999 by English immigrant Peter Brimelo

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trump lobby trans

• Martin Dannenfelser – Dept. of Energy. Lobbying client was the Family Research Council. Deregistered 2000, worked at the Energy Innovation Reform Project.

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backed many of? TP 2010

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/the-ten-scariest-republicans-heading-to-congress/

==

5) Obama Will Create A Personal Brownshirt Army

Ret. Gen. Jerry Boykin, who now serves as the executive vice president of the Family Research Council, repeatedly predicted that Obama planned to “establish a constabulary force” through the Affordable Care Act that would “control the population in America” much in the same way that Adolf Hitler used the Brownshirts to consolidate power, basing his accusation on a debunked myth about the health care law.

Boykin wasn’t alone in predicting that Obama would create such an army.

Another former military official, Ret. Army Major General Jerry Curry, warned that the Obama administration might “arm illegal immigrants” to begin killing Americans, with a focus on assassinating members of the armed forces.

Then-Republican Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia similarly warned in 2008 that Obama’s proposed expansion of national service programs was “exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany” and “exactly what the Soviet Union did.” Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, claimed in 2013 that Obama’s “secret security force” was already in existence.

Lawrence C. Mackin, a conservative writer, warned that Obama was bent on creating a “private internal army” including “illegal aliens” and Middle Eastern terrorists, and William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC said Obama would give immigrants “a badge and a gun” in order to target the “Christian, heterosexual male” population. Far-right activist Jim Garrow thought Obama would fake contact with aliens in order to justify the creation of his own army.

Convinced that President Obama was set to wage an anti-white race war, radio host Michael Savage said that Obama intended to arm and “deputize” members of the Crips and Bloods gangs and turn them into his “shock troops.” He also claimed that Black Lives Matter supporters would be “Obama’s shock troops” and “secret private army” much like “the Brownshirts that Hitler had.”

==

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-conservative-playbook-for-keeping-dark-money-dark

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9. Troy Newman: The president of Operation Rescue jumped aboard the Trump train this week. An anti-choice extremist, Newman even co-authored a book with a would-be domestic terrorist, Cheryl Sullenberger, who in 1988 was sentenced to three years in federal prison for conspiring to blow up an abortion clinic. In that 2003 book, Newman and Sullenberger argue, according to People for the American Way, “that the government has a responsibility to execute abortion providers.”

Time was when a presidential candidate who played footsie with segregationists and white supremacists would have banished to the fringes of the American political scene. But Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump has changed all that.

Oh sure, there have been plenty of codes telegraphed to the anti-black base of the GOP’s southern flank: Ronald Reagan’s choice of Philadelphia, Mississippi, as the place to make a “states’ rights” speech in his 1980 presidential campaign; Richard Nixon’s southern strategy and “Silent Majority” framing. But after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, expressions of outright racism were frowned upon in presidential politics. And articulations of misogyny were generally doled out in the form of withering condescension.

I don’t need to recount for you Trump’s friendliness with the alt-right, the white nationalist movement that was given a platform at Breitbart News by Stephen K. Bannon, the man Trump hired as his campaign CEO. You don’t need to take my word for it; Bannon has boasted of this fact. And you surely know of Trump’s numerous retweets of posts and memes from white supremacist websites. And who can forget all of the lovely things he’s said about women, calling them fat pigs and demeaning them for having menstrual periods?

Just yesterday, Trump’s running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, declined for a second time to say that former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke was “deplorable,” stating that he isn’t “in the name-calling business.” Isn’t it enough, Pence asked, that he and Trump have disavowed Duke’s endorsement?

Trump yesterday won the endorsement of Operation Rescue president Troy Newman, an anti-choice extremist who co-authored a 2003 book, according to People for the American Way, that “argued that the government has a responsibility to execute abortion providers.” In 1988, Newman’s co-author, Cheryl Sullenberger, was sentenced to three years in federal prison for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic.

On Friday, Donald Trump appeared before evangelical Christians assembled at the Values Voter Summit, an annual confab convened by FRC Action, the political arm of the Family Research Council. The conference exhibit hall featured the booths of such co-sponsors as Tradition, Family and Property, a paleo-Catholic cult whose founder described the Spanish Inquisition as the church’s most glorious moment, and the conspiracy-theorist and segregationist John Birch Society, which William F. Buckley thought he had managed to purge from the conservative movement in 1962. This was the first time the JBS appeared in the Values Voter hall of sponsors. It could be said that the Trump candidacy helped pave the way, what with his embrace of the conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones, and his numerous winks to white nationalist extremists.

The following day, FRC President Tony Perkins, who has endorsed Trump, defended the alt-right when I asked him about the movement at a press conference. Its existence, he seemed to say, was the fault of President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, for having “snuffed out” the voices of people who disagree with the administration’s policies.

To lay all of this at Trump’s feet would be to give him too much credit. As I’ve argued before, the misogynist, racist, nativist, anti-LGBT right wing that took over the GOP in 1980—of which Perkins himself is evidence—has much to answer for, not least of all, the rise of Donald Trump as the party’s standard-bearer. Trump may not have been the first choice of right-wing leaders, but they created the conditions that cleared his path to the nomination, and most have lined up behind him since he won it.

But mainstream media are also complicit in this normalization of hatred, allowing it to masquerade in the guise political positions. For decades, when reporting on the Christian right, for example, media have treated it as a religious movement, barely mentioning—if at all—the roots of movement positions in the segregationist backlash of the South. Instead, media executives allowed themselves to be cowed by the right wing’s outrage machine, every time it cranked up its conveyor belt of allegations of the anti-religion bent of reporters.

Today, the same tendency is evident in the false-equivalence reporting prevalent in the degrees to which media cover different stories. Questions about Clinton’s emails demand teams of reporters toiling for months; scandals involving Trump are too often written as one-off reports—so fearful are mainstream editors of fielding an accusation of liberal bias.

In the meantime, a monster has been allowed to grow in our midst. Bannon take an obscure fringe of the right and elevates it to a platform that garners tens of millions of pageviews per month. Trump hires Bannon. Media say, hey, that’s interesting, do one story, and say, “Next?”

Covering the Values Voter Summit this September 9 and 10 was downright depressing. Trump addressed the conference on Friday, and Pence on Saturday—meaning that the conference attendees represent a legitimized constituency of the GOP, as they have for 30 years. The founders of the religious right are passing onto their just rewards. Organizers Paul Weyrich and Howard Phillips died in 2008 and 2013, respectively; Phyllis Schlafly died on September 5 (but not before she took the opportunity to endorse Trump). The movement they founded, however, continues to wreak the havoc of hate on the American political landscape, and the media dare not call it by its name.

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/normalization-evil-american-politics

Perkins Warns Of Government "Promotion Of Same-Sex Relations" For Population Control

Submitted by Brian Tashman on Thursday, 10/13/2011 10:40 am

Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance appeared on Janet Parshall’s radio show *In The Market* on Tuesday to discuss the “Green Dragon” film series which was made by Beisner’s group and hosted by Parshall. As we discussed in our report *The ‘Green Dragon’ Slayers: How the Religious Right and the Corporate Right are Joining Forces to Fight Environmental Protection*, the “Green Dragon” series represents efforts by the Religious Right and the Corporate Right to paint environmentalism as anti-Christian and ungodly:

During the radio show, Parshall played clips from the“documentary,” including one from Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, who argues that in the name of “population control” the government will eventually push “infanticide” and promote “same-sex relations”:

Perkins: Population control is a very loaded term. It includes not only abortion, contraception and sterilization, all at government expense of course, but it also includes infanticide and the promotion of same-sex relations. At the heart of this push for population control is an unbiblical view of children and of life.

Another clip featured right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton. Barton, who has made a career of infusing Religious Right beliefs into politics and American history, accused environmentalism of being “a religion” with its own rules and “high priests,” and went on to tell people to contest environmental beliefs because “that’s not science, that is the faith position that you’re taking”:

Barton: People say that environmentalism is a religion. Others say, ‘Oh no, that’s not true,’ but it really is. Now how do we know? I’ve been involved in seven cases at the US Supreme Court and I can point to a number of court decisions where the court has said religion is whatever you believe so strongly that it affects the way you live your life. That’s why the court recognizes even atheism as a religion. Environmentalism definitely is a religion, it has its own high priests, it has folks that tell us what we can and can’t do with the environment and how we can treat it and they’re the guardians of it as if it’s a great temple. It’s a religion. And as soon as we recognize that environmentalism is a religion then it helps us to understand better how to respond to what’s being said, how to filter what’s being said, and say, now wait a minute, that’s not science, that is the faith position that you’re taking.

Filed Under

Organizations:

undefined, Religious Right, PFAW, Family Research Council, Cornwall Alliance

People:

Tony Perkins, Calvin Beisner

Topics:

Supreme Court, Science, Religious Right, Religion, Politics, green dragon, Environment, court decisions, Abortion

==

http://www.grist.org/article/2010-12-17-environmentalism-is-a-plot-to-take-over-the-world-says-coalition

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Family_Research_Council

Family Research Council

From SourceWatch

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The Family Research Council (FRC) is an organization in Washington, D.C. that grew out of Ronald Reagan's neoconservative "pro-family" domestic agenda.

History

According to the organization's website, "the Family Research Council (FRC) champions marriage and family as the foundation of civilization, the seedbed of virtue, and the wellspring of society. FRC shapes public debate and formulate public policy that values human life and upholds the institutions of marriage and the family. Believing that God is the author of life, liberty, and the family, FRC promotes the Judeo-Christian worldview as the basis for a just, free, and stable society."

"The idea of the Family Research Council originated at the 1980 White House Conference on Families. Among the conferees, James Dobson stood out because of his rare combination of Christian social values and academic and professional credentials. A practicing clinical psychologist and noted author, Dobson had recently transitioned into radio broadcasting and also launched a nonprofit, family service organization. He felt that the time was ripe to establish an organization that would drive the national debate on family issues. In 1983, the Family Research Council incorporated as a nonprofit educational institution in the District of Columbia; its founding board included Dobson and two noted psychiatrists, Armand Nicholoi. Jr. of Harvard University and George Rekers of the University of South Carolina," it states.

"Under the leadership of Gerry Regier, a former Reagan Administration official at the Department of Health and Human Services, FRC began to link policy makers with researchers and professionals from a variety of disciplines. Gary Bauer, a domestic policy advisor to President Reagan, succeeded Regier in 1988 and by the mid-1990s the organization had grown into a $10 million operation with a nationwide network of support...", it states.^[1]

The FRC is associated with James Dobson's Focus on the Family and William J. Bennett.

Gay escort controversy

In May, 2010, the Miami New Times reported that on April 13, FRC co-founder George Rekers was photographed arriving at the Miami International Airport with a male escort after having taken a ten day trip to Europe. The services of Rekers' companion, identified only by the name Lucien, were found to have been advertised solely on the Web site RentBoy.com, a gay escort/masseur Web site. Lucien's profile on the site was only accessible after the viewer acknowledged he is over age 18 and clicks a button saying he is aware that the site contains "content and materials that are of a graphic and/or sexual nature."^[2] Rekers claimed that the man was there to help him carry his luggage, since he had recently had surgery and was unable to carry it himself. Rekers was pushing his own luggage cart when he and Lucien were spotted at the airport. Rekers denied knowing Lucien's line of work, to which Lucien expressed his surprise. ^[3][4][5]

Following the April, 2010 scandal regarding Rekers being caught with a young professional male escort in Miami, the Family Research Council eliminated Rekers from the organization's history and their website at http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?c=HISTORY_ABOUT.

Personnel

• Tony Perkins, President
• Chuck Donovan, Executive Vice President
• Tom McClusky, Vice President for Government Affairs
• Charmaine Yoest, Vice President for Communications
• Robert Morrison, Vice President for Academic Affairs
• Peter Sprigg, Vice President for Policy
• J. Kenneth Blackwell, Senior Fellow for Family Empowerment
• David Prentice, Senior Fellow for Life Sciences, Center for Human Life and Bioethics
• Patrick F. Fagan, Senior Fellow and Director for Marriage and Religion Center^[6]

Opposition to health care reform

On December 16, 2009, FRC held a one-hour "prayercast" to oppose health care reform. The press release promoting the event announced it would be attended by a number of Republican elected representatives who have been among the most vocal opponents of health care reform including Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), Senator Jim DeMint, (R-South Carolina) Rep. Randy Forbes, (R-Virginia) and Rep. Michele Bachmann, (R-Minnesota).^[7]

James Dobson of Focus on the Family, speaking at the prayercast, referred to President Obama as the “Evil One,“ saying "I just pray that you will frustrate the plans of the Evil One and revive us again with conviction and forgiveness,” said Dobson. Pastor Jim Garlow of Skyline Church in San Diego, California made the case that the proposed health care reform bill violated nearly all Ten Commandments. ^[8] Bachmann led the group in a prayer asking for forgiveness of governmental leaders who have not looked to God in crafting healthcare reform legislation.^[9]

Contact information

http://www.frc.org/

SourceWatch Resources

• Justice Sunday
• The Bush Theocracy
• theocracy
• Robert Knight
• George Rekers

External resources

• RentBoy.com

References

1. ↑ History/Mission, Family Research Council, accessed March 17, 2008.
2. ↑ RentBoy.com RentBoy.com home page, accessed May 5, 2010
3. ↑ Penn Bullock, Brandon K. Thorpe Christian right leader George Rekers takes vacation with "rent boy", Miami New Times, May 6, 2010
4. ↑ Ria Viente Anti-gay activist George Rekers hired a gay escort, 24World News, May 5, 2010
5. ↑ Alvin McEwen Anti-gay organization founder travels with a 'rentboy' Huffington Post, May 4, 2010
6. ↑ The FRC Team, Family Research Council, accessed March 17, 2008.
7. ↑ J.P. Duffy, Family Research Council FRC Action to Host Live PrayerCast Tonight on Health Care Reform, Press release. 1 page. December 16, 2009
8. ↑ Sue, Chattahbox Bachmann at Anti-Health Care Bill Prayercast: Leaders Deserve God’s Wrath, News blog, December 17, 2009
9. ↑ Kyle, Right Wing Watch Prayercast: Bachmann and Engle Blog. Video. December 17, 2009

External links

• Bill Berkowitz, "The Family Research Council's Tony Perkins Is a Rising Star in a Crowded Universe of Evangelical Christian Leaders," MediaTransparency.org, July 17, 2005.
• MinistryWatch's opinion
• Bill Berkowitz, "'Where's the outrage?': Another fracture in the conservative evangelical movement", Media Transparency, April 14, 2006.
• John Aravosis, "Religious right misleads its followers in massive email blitz about weekend peace march," AMERICAblog, February 1, 2007.
• Bill Berkowitz, "Ken Blackwell, Ohio's defeated GOP gubernatorial candidate, lands in D.C. Despite former secretary of state's role in multiple election mishaps, he signs on with Tony Perkins," WorkingForChange, May 24, 2007. re J. Kenneth Blackwell
• David D. Kirkpatrick, "Giuliani Inspires Threat of a Third-Party Run", The New York Times, October 1, 2007.

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Family_Research_Council"

Categories: Religion | Right wing | Health | Lobbying

related: rick perry response rally

The American Family Association

The American Family Association is the driving force behind The Response. Founded by the Rev. Don Wildmon in 1977, the organization is based is best known for its various boycott campaigns, promotion of art censorship, and political advocacy against women’s rights and LGBT equality. The organization also controls the vast American Family Radio and an online news service, in addition to sponsoring various conferences frequented by Republican leaders, including the Values Voter Summit and Rediscovering God in America. The AFA today is led by Tim Wildmon, Don’s son, and its chief spokesperson is Bryan Fischer, the Director of Issues Analysis for Government and Public Policy and host of its flagship radio show Focal Point.

Fischer routinely expresses support for some of the most bigoted and shocking ideas found in the Religious Right today. He has:

• held gays responsible for the Holocaustand likened them to domestic terrorists and Nazis who are intent on committing “virtual genocide” against the military, and asserts that “homosexuals should be disqualified from public office”;
• said “we have feminized the Medal of Honor” by awarding it to a soldier who saved his fellow combatants rather than killing enemies;
• demanded all immigrants “convert to Christianity” and renounce their religions;
• asserted that Muslims have “no fundamental First Amendment claims” and should bebanned from building mosquesand deported from the US, adding that Muslims are inherently stupid as a result of inbreeding;
• claimed African American women “rut like rabbits” due to welfare and that Native Americans are “morally disqualified” from living in America because they didn’t convert to Christianity and were consequently cursed by God with alcoholism and poverty;
• said that the anti-Muslim manifesto of the right-wing Christian terrorist who killed dozens in Norway was “accurate.”

Other AFA leaders and activists are just as radical:

• AFA President Tim Wildmon claims that by repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell President Obama shows he “doesn’t give a ripabout the Marines or the Army” and “just wants to force homosexuality into every place that he can.”
• AFA Vice President Buddy Smith, who is on the leadership council of The Response, said that gays and lesbians are “in the clasp of Satan.”
• The head of the AFA’s women’s group led a boycott against Glee because she accused it of indoctrinating children in homosexuality and idolatry.The editor of AFA Journal Ed Vitagliano said that gay pride months are an affront to the Founding Fathers and will usher in “a return to pagan sexuality.”
• A columnist for the AFA demanded Christians stop practicing yoga because it was inspired by the “evil” religions of Buddhism and Hinduism.

gop platform:

2. Tony Perkins.Perkins heads the Family Research Council, whose Values Voter Summit is the Religious Right’s most important annual conference, where activists rub shoulders with Republican officials and candidates. Perkins _{bragged}_ [6] in an email to his supporters how much influence he and his friend David Barton (see below) had on the platform. Perkins was an active member of the platform committee, proposing language to oppose school-based health clinics that provide referrals for contraception or abortion, and arguing for the strongest possible anti-marriage equality language. Perkins also introduced an amendment to the platform calling on the District of Columbia government to loosen its gun laws, which Perkins says still do not comply with recent Supreme Court rulings.

The media tends to treat Perkins, a telegenic former state legislator, as a reasonable voice of the Religious Right, but his record and his group’s positions prove otherwise. Perkins has been aggressively _{exploiting}_ [7] the recent shooting at FRC headquarters to divert attention from the group’s extremism by claiming that the Southern Poverty Law Centerwas irresponsible in calling FRC a hate group. Unfortunately for Perkins, the group’s record of promoting hatred toward LGBT people is well-documented. Perkins has even complained that the press and President Obama were being too hard on Uganda’s infamous “kill the gays” bill, which he _{described}_ [7] as an attempt to “uphold moral conduct.” It’s worth remembering that Perkins ran a 1996 campaign for Louisiana Senate candidate Woody Jenkins that paid $82,600 to David Duke for the Klan leader’s mailing list; the campaign was _{fined}_ [8] by the FEC for trying to cover it up.

3. David Barton. Texas Republican activist and disgraced Christian-nation “historian” Barton has had a tough year, but Tampa has been good to him. He was perhaps the most vocal member of the platform committee, and was a featured speaker at Sunday’s pre-convention “prayer rally.” During the platform committee’s final deliberations, Barton couldn’t seem to hear his own voice often enough. He was the know-it-all nitpicker, piping up with various language changes, such as deleting a reference to the family as the “school of democracy” because families are not democracies. He thought it was too passive to call Obamacare an “erosion of” the Constitution and thought it should be changed to an “attack on” the founding document. He called for stronger anti-public education language and asserted that large school districts employ one administrator for every teacher. He backed anti-abortion language, tossing out the claim that 127 medical studies over five decades say that abortion hurts women.

Progressives have been documenting Barton’s lies for years, but more recently conservative evangelical scholars have also been _{hammering}_ [9] his claims about American history. The critical chorus got so loud that Christian publishing powerhouse Thomas Nelson pulled Barton’s most recent book – which, ironically, purports to correct “lies” about Thomas Jefferson – from the shelves. Of course, Barton has had plenty of practice at this sort of thing, from producing bogus [10] documentaries [10] designed to turn African Americans against the Democratic Party to pushing his religious and political ideology into Texas _{textbooks}_ [11]. Barton’s right-wing friends like Glenn Beck have rallied around him. And nothing seems to tarnish Barton with the GOP allies for whom he has proven politically useful over the years.

aug 2012 hmn

**David Brody**, the chief political reporter for CBN News admitted in an MSNBC "Morning Joe" discussion this morning that the **Koch Brothers**, **Karl Rove**, and the **Tea Party** are "coming together" with major anti-gay organizations and a hate group, the **Family Research Council**.

CBN News is the Christian Broadcasting Network, founded by televangelist Pat Robertson in 1961. Brody, author of the new book, The Teavangelicals: The Inside Story of How the Evangelicals and the Tea Party are Taking Back America,is also "a political contributor to Glenn Beck's GBTV network," according to CBN. "We talk about the pro-life groups but the pro-life groups are also the Tea Party type groups, in other words, they're all coming together," Brody told the panel, explaining the close relationship between the Tea Party, Tea Party organizations, the Koch Brothers (who fund those groups,) anti-gay organizations, and anti-gay hate groups. "Here's my point: Concerned Women for America, a pro-life group, they're working with Americans For Prosperity, Tim Phillips group, and so they're doing a lot of bus tours together." **Americans For Prosperity** was founded by the Koch Brothers. While **Concerned Women for America** is not technically a named anti-gay hate group, they are mentioned in this **Southern Poverty Law Center** article, "18 Anti-Gay Groups and Their Propaganda" at least five times. They, their work, and their people have been embedded in several other anti-gay hate groups, like the **Family Research Council**, Traditional Values Coalition, **Americans for Truth About Homosexuality**, and Chalcedon Foundation, the SPLC reports. Here's what the Southern Poverty Law Center article says about Concerned Women for America:

San Diego, Calif., activist Beverly LaHaye, whose husband Tim would go on to become famous as co-author of the Left Behind novels depicting the end times, started Concerned Women for America (CWA) in 1979 to create an anti-feminist group that matched the power of the National Organization for Women. Today, CWA claims more than 500,000 members organized into state chapters, a radio program that reaches more than 1 million listeners, and a cadre of attorneys and researchers devoted to the group’s mission of promoting biblical values. LaHaye has blamed gay people for a “radical leftist crusade” in America and, over the years, has occasionally equated homosexuality with pedophilia. In 2001, she hired prominent anti-gay propagandists Robert Knight (now with Coral Ridge Ministries; see below) and Peter LaBarbera (now with Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, above) to launch CWA’s Culture and Family Institute. Matt Barber was CWA’s policy director for cultural issues in 2007 and 2008 before moving on to similar work with the Liberty Counsel (below). While at CWA, on April 12, 2007, Barber suggested against all the evidence that there were only a “miniscule number” of anti-gay hate crimes and most of those “may very well be rooted in fraudulent reports.” In comments that have since disappeared from CWA’s website, Barber demanded a federal probe of “homosexual activists” for their alleged fabrications of hate crime reports. CWA long relied on and displayed Knight’s articles and talking points, including claims that “homosexuality carries enormous physical and mental health risks” and “gay marriage entices children to experiment with homosexuality.” Most remarkably, Knight cited the utterly discredited work of Paul Cameron (see Family Research Institute, below) to bolster claims that homosexuality is harmful. Today, CWA continues to make arguments against homosexuality on the basis of dubious claims. President Wendy Wright said this August that gay activists were using same-sex marriage “to indoctrinate children in schools to reject their parents’ values and to harass, sue and punish people who disagree.” Last year, CWA accused the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a group that works to stop anti-gay bullying in schools, of using that mission as a cover to promote homosexuality in schools, adding that “teaching students from a young age that the homosexual lifestyle is perfectly natural … will [cause them to] develop into adults who are desensitized to the harmful, immoral reality of sexual deviance.”

"Family Research Council, the pro-life group, is working with Colin Hanna, and Let Freedom Ring, another Tea Party group. It's all very much a conglomerate... coming together," Brody continued. *Business Week* describes Let Freedom Ringas "an advocacy organization active with ads targeting Obama in 2008 and whose founder is evangelical Christian John Templeton, and Washington-based Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, which is affiliated with Republican political strategist Karl Rove, are also airing commercials critical of the president’s energy policy." **Tony Perkins**' **Family Research Council**, which most of America now knows is listed as an anti-gay hate group by the **Southern Poverty Law Center**, who notes:

Headed since 2003 by former Louisiana State Rep. Tony Perkins, the FRC has been a font of anti-gay propaganda throughout its history. It relies on the work of Robert Knight, who also worked at Concerned Women for America but now is at Coral Ridge Ministries (see above for both), along with that of FRC senior research fellows Tim Dailey (hired in 1999) and Peter Sprigg (2001). Both Dailey and Sprigg have pushed false accusations linking gay men to pedophilia: Sprigg has written that most men who engage in same-sex child molestation “identify themselves as homosexual or bisexual,” and Dailey and Sprigg devoted an entire chapter of their 2004 book Getting It Straight to similar material. The men claimed that “homosexuals are overrepresented in child sex offenses” and similarly asserted that “homosexuals are attracted in inordinate numbers to boys.” That’s the least of it. In a 1999 publication (Homosexual Activists Work to Normalize Sex With Boys) that has since disappeared from its website, the FRC claimed that “one of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order,” according to unrefuted research by AMERICAblog. The same publication argued that “homosexual activists publicly disassociate themselves from pedophiles as part of a public relations strategy.” FRC offered no evidence for these remarkable assertions, and has never publicly retracted the allegations. (The American Psychological Association, among others, has concluded that “homosexual men are not more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual men are.”) In fact, in a Nov. 30, 2010, debate on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” between Perkins and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok, Perkins defended FRC’s association of gay men with pedophilia, saying: “If you look at the American College of Pediatricians, they say the research is overwhelming that homosexuality poses a danger to children. So Mark is wrong. He needs to go back and do his own research.” In fact, the college, despite its hifalutin name, is a tiny, explicitly religious-right breakaway group from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the 60,000-member association of the profession. Publications of the American College of Pediatricians, which has some 200 members, have been roundly attacked by leading scientific authorities who say they are baseless and accuse the college of distorting and misrepresenting their work. Elsewhere, according to AMERICAblog, Knight, while working at the FRC, claimed that “[t]here is a strong current of pedophilia in the homosexual subculture. … [T]hey want to promote a promiscuous society.” AMERICAblog also reported that then-FRC official Yvette Cantu, in an interview published on Americans for Truth About Homosexuality’s website, said, “If they [gays and lesbians] had children, what would happen when they were too busy having their sex parties?” More recently, in March 2008, Sprigg, responding to a question about uniting gay partners during the immigration process, said: “I would much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them.” He later apologized, but then went on, last February, to tell MSNBC host Chris Matthews, “I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions on homosexual behavior.” “So we should outlaw gay behavior?” Matthews asked. “Yes,” Sprigg replied. At around the same time, Sprigg claimed that allowing gay people to serve openly in the military would lead to an increase in gay-on-straight sexual assaults.

Brody also stated this morning: "What Ted Cruz did last night, talking about our rights come from God not government, Mitt Romney used that exact line in Irwin Pennsylvania and had -- and I counted it -- a 17-second standing ovation. Bigger than Obamacare, bigger than anything else." And Brody admitted Republican Senatorial nominee Ted Cruz used "code language" to appeal to religious voters, like, "the great awakening," and agreed the former President George W. Bush also used the idea that rights come from God not from government. "We hear about this all the time in those Tea Party and Evangelical circles, I call them the Teavangelical circles, you know, the great awakening, very much a spiritual reference to our nation's history," Brody said, talking about his book. "I talk about how our rights come from God, not government," Brody added. 10 days ago, *The New Civil Rights Movement* reported on a new poll that found while "Democrats came in with 68% support for same-sex marriage, Independents with 57%, and Republicans with only 30%, a mere 6% of Tea Party members said they support same-sex marriage. No other group was close to that low support level." The relevant portion begins around the 8:00 minute mark, but the entire clip is fascinating.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

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