Far Right Anti-LGBTQ Evangelical Extremists On The Warpath For Trump And His Republican Enablers

You may recall that last cycle Blue America teamed up with a group of progressive evangelical pastors, Vote Common Good, to help progressive candidates across the country get in touch with evangelical voters who were not feeling Trump and his enablers were good for their families and our country. They helped elect more than a few Democrats to the House, including Katie Porter (D-CA) and Veronica Escobar (D-TX). This cycle they are continuing their work with Mike Siegel (TX), Kara Eastman (NE), Audrey Denney (CA), J.D. Scholten (IA).

Right Wing Watch reported yesterday that the viciously anti-LGBTQ neo-Nazi operation, Family Research Council is targeting Vote Common Good with their typical abuse against progressive organizations and are fundraising by denigrating them and lying about them.

The most recent mail item signed by Family Research Council President Tony Perkins and distributed to supporters takes direct aim at Vote Common Good, a liberal faith organization whose stated purpose is “changing the narrative that has under-girded white Evangelical and Catholic support for President Trump Republicans who, for a variety of reasons, have put other priorities over the common good.”

“The Democrat Party often feels resistant to connecting with religiously-minded voters, while the Republican Party is held hostage by religious extremism. We will work hard to help both parties engage Common Good religiously oriented voters in ways that will add benefit to their political expression and not allow religion to be a wedge issue in our politics,” Vote Common Good’s website states.

But the envelope containing the fundraising letter from Family Research Council declares in bold font: “SOROS EXPOSED! His plan to send out liberal Christians quoting Scripture to deceive and divide Evangelical Voters.”

Family Research Council tells supporters in the fundraising letter that Vote Common Good “sends out ultra-liberal pastors and speakers who identify as Christians and dress up their radical political agenda in biblical terms” and asks supporters to donate “the most generous gift you can manage at this time.”

“You and I must act now to alert our brothers and sisters in Christ not to fall for this deception,” Perkins writes, going on to characterize faith leaders working with Vote Common Good as “deceivers” who “sow confusion and division among Bible-believing Christians.”

In another fundraising letter received last week, Perkins urged supporters to send Family Research Council “the most generous donation you can manage” with a signed piece of paper pledging to pray for President Trump. Perkins wrote that the signed cards would be delivered to the White House “as soon as possible.” But those who send the prayer pledge back to Family Research Council are told to keep an attached bookmark that reminds them to pray for Trump.

Vote Common Good did several successful high-visibility events in evangelical communities with J.D. Scholten in western Iowa last year. This morning, J.D. reminded me that "The Democratic Party shouldn’t automatically cede religious voters to the Republican party. It’s when we write off people and places like Rural America, and Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, that we lose elections, and our country is worse off. We need to get out there and connect directly with the people and fight for every vote. We have to show up and prove that we are the party of family values: fighting for affordable and comprehensive healthcare, quality education, safe communities to live in and raise a family, decent jobs with benefits-- the list goes on!"

It was author and filmmaker Frank Schaefer, an expert on the religionist right, who first introduced us to Vote Common Good. This morning he wrote that "America's white evangelicals were asked by Trump to choose between himself and Jesus. "They chose Trump." I asked him what to make of this attack on fellow Christians. He told me this morning that "In targeting VCG there is an echo of what Jeffress said:

I’ve literally spoken to thousands and thousands of evangelical Christians, I have never seen them more angry over any issue than this attempt to illegitimately remove this president from office, overturn the 2016 election and negate the votes of millions of evangelicals in the process. And if the Democrats are successful in removing the president from office, I’m afraid it will cause a Civil War-like fracture in this nation from which this country will never heal.

"Now Trump is conducting an all-out assault on the impeachment process, calling it a coup in a pair of tweets posted on Tuesday:

As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!

What drives the depth and intensity of support for Trump? And how far are those supporters willing to go to keep him in the White House? A desire for the imposition of a whites-only theocracy is what drives the white evangelical Trump vote-- 'Christian America.'"

UPDATE: Sign Me Up:

Ted Lieu (D-CA) took note of the Family Research Council attacks on VCG as well. "Vote Common Good must be doing good work if the Family Research Council is fear mongering about them. If protecting the planet, providing affordable healthcare, and cleaning up our government is a 'radical political agenda' then sign me up!"

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

-by Noah

A couple of days ago, Señor Trumpanzee was the first sitting president to speak at the Family Research Council's annual hate fest. While we shouldn't be surprised that a psychopath would eagerly attend an American hate group's conference to lend encouragement and endorse their activities, a lot of people were surprised (incredulous is a better word) when our madman "leader" of the free world made the bold faced claim that his (and their) agenda is "substantially ahead of schedule." Sure, there is zero doubt that the Trumpanzee is an over the top boastful megalomaniac whose pathological lying knows no bounds, yet his kool-aid saturated crowd cheered and stomped with their drooling approval just the same. When he punctuated his statement with his standard "Believe me." They did.

The mob at the Family Research Council's so-called Values Summit is a virulent bunch. They look at the influx of "damn foreigners" into our country (documented undocumented alike) and they scream that they "want our country back." Back from whom? Back from "those people." They long for a time when caucasians were the vast majority of the population in this country. That time is gone and isn't coming back, short of genocide, of course; something that, judging from their statements and social media pages, many of these fake christians would be all for. They don't want to live in a country and world where the influx of what they call, in the words of one of their heroes, republican Senate candidate Judge Roy Moore, "browns" and "yellows" continues. They see the races mixing because we no longer have segregation and they are appalled. If you want to really get them going, just tell them that "brown babies" are just part of the millennia-long evolution of humankind. Make sure to say 'humankind' and not 'mankind.' Hell, just the word 'evolution' will send their blood pressure heading for the moon. Want to take it further and watch the fun? I have. It's easy. After bringing up evolution and/or the inevitability of race mixing, just bring up something, anything about gay people. Damn. You could bake a whole wedding cake using just the heat coming off their foreheads!

Homophobia was well-represented at the "Values Summit." The swag bag given to attendees even included a bonkers brochure titled "The Health Hazards Of Homosexuality." The brochure pushes a book that claims no one is "born gay" and that homosexuality is an "attack on 'traditional marriage'. Yeah. Whatever. Keep in mind that we not only have a thrice-married serial adulterer and admitted predator in the White House, we also have a VP that thinks gay kids should have their homosexuality electrocuted right out of them. No doubt, this crowd eagerly would watch such a thing on TV for hours; if only "the media" wasn't "controlled by liberals."

So, look at all of these hats in the today's meme. Look at all those things Trump voters voted for Trump for. The hats put the lie to his claim of being "substantially ahead of schedule" with his agenda. In truth (not that truth matters to his supporters) the Trumpanzee has failed to get even one single piece of legislation passed into law. That's a very good thing, given what he wants to do to America and its Constitution. but, as exemplified by his attacks on Obamacare, he has done a lot of damage to the lives of Americans. Why, it's enough to make you wonder just who he's working for. Believe me.

Those hats represent a catalog of lies he got elected on. The Values Summit attendees and the rest of his supporters don't seem to have any problems with the promises left unkept. To this point, there is only a slight erosion in the Trumpanzee's support among republicans. The vast majority of Trump's supporters still love him. Apparently, the unkept promises don't bother them one bit. Ask yourself why, despite all these broken promises that were obviously insincere from the get-go, Trump's voters still support their man. Look at the hats. Do you see what's missing? Do you see what Trump has stayed true to? Do you see the core, base value that Trump has delivered on and delivers on on a daily basis? Do you see what Senor Trumpanzee has not backed off of one bit? Do you see why, despite all of his failures, they still cheer him?

The answer is racism and bigotry. Those are the core values of Trump, his party, and his voters. They are number one, by far. He can break any promise and fail to deliver on any of his promises but those that enhance racism and bigotry. Attacking president Obama's Iran deal and Obamacare (and any of his achievements), appointing Jeff Sessions as AG and Betsy DeVos as Secretary Of Education are just four examples of manifestations of Trumpian bigotries. Racism and bigotry are the easiest for Trump to deliver on. You can deliver on those with just emotion and words. No legislation required, although, to his voters, that would be very nice, too. Trump has emboldened racists and bigots of every kind everywhere, and not just in Charlottesville. For that, Trump's voters love him and will continue to do so. Such very fine people.

This crazy notion that the Family Research Council is NOT a hate group -- it's some kind of nutty joke, right?

Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

by Ken

I started writing a diatribe about the perversion of truth by the American Right, and especially the American Christian Right, and then abandoned it. I suppose I can always come back to it.

I'm concerned at the moment at the prospect that one of the nation's vilest hate-mongers, Tony Perkins, commandant of the Family "Research" Council (FRC), may succeed in damaging the reputation of one of the country's most indispensable forces for decency and humanity, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has certified the FRC as a hate group based on careful research into a mountain of evidence that comes right out of the FRC.

And when I say "research," I mean actual research, where you go out and actively search for the truth, not the kind practiced by the lying phonies of the Right, like the FRC, which has the temerity to use the word "research" in its name when it has never for the tiniest microsecond engaged in any such activity. The FRC's "researchers" troll the swamps of their imaginations for any factoid that can be twisted into incendiary accusations against its enemies, which is to say people who are concerned with the truth. FRC hates the truth, and indeed there is by now a mountain of evidence that most of what it does is the knowing fabrication of lies to be used for hate-mongering propaganda purposes.

Yesterday America Blog's John Aravosis put up a desperately important post, "Why the Family Research Council is a hate group." He answers the question directly:

Because they lie.

And they know they lie.

And they don't care.

And they've been doing it for twenty years.

And when I say "lie," I don't mean the standard Washington, DC version of a "lie," which is basically calling a lie anything you disagree with (aka, your facts hurt me so I'm simply going to call you a liar). I mean, an organization that decided early on that "the gay menace" was such a threat to American life that if it had to deceive the American people in order to convince them that gays were the anti-Christ, then so be it.

John was driven into action by the assertion of the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, whom he insists he respects and likes, that the FRC is simply a "mainstream conservative" group. "I happen to like Dana Milbank," he says, "but I suspect he hasn't done what I've done," which is to say actual "research on the anti-gay literature that the Family Research Council publishes, and the anti-gay pseudo-science that FRC 'cites' on TV."

At one point, I had the Congressional Research Service send me a copy of every single document the Family Research Council had written about gays, and then I had CRS get me every single document listed in the FRC doc's footnotes. I.e., all the "original sources" for the Family Research Council's anti-gay claims.

And there were a lot of them. At the time, FRC's list of footnotes could be nearly as long as the written part of the document itself.

What did I find when I went through the original sources cited in the footnotes? I found that nearly every single footnote was a lie. Not a lie in the conventional sense - meaning, they didn't make up a source that didn't exist. Rather, they did things like quoting a damning opinion from a judge in a court case without mention that the judge was in the minority, that the gays had actually won the case they were citing.

Or they'd quote a study with a hideous conclusion about gays and lesbians, only for you to realize later that the actual quote in the study was rather benign - instead, FRC "forgot" to put and end-quotation mark on the quote, added an ellipse, and then put their own damning conclusion. Let me give you a made-up example of a quote about gays to who you how the family research council did this.

"This study looked at 45 gay men, and 35 lesbians. It was clear from the subjects that gay men and lesbians face greater societal pressures in their day to day lives... which makes gays and lesbians much more likely to rip the heads off small bunnies.

Wow, rip the heads off small bunnies - that's pretty bad. But hey, it's a real study in a real journal, so it has to be true. Except of course that the real quote from the actual study ends at the ellipse, while the FRC added its own opinion after the ellipse, while "forgetting" to put the end quote, so it looks like the FRC's opinion is part of the official quote from the reputable study.

Gosh, I wonder how that happened?

It went on and on like this, through hundreds of footnotes. I went through the original research of the various studies they cited and found that the study reached no such conclusion like the FRC claimed it did. And on and on and on.

These are not honest people simply expressing a contrarian view of politics, like Democrats and Republicans do every day in Washington.

I can't begin to do justice to John's post here, and won't even try. The quantity and range of damning information he has gathered is, well, damning. It spans the history of the FRC, and allows for no possibility that the history of incendiary falsification has been accidental. Its cadre of professional liars has had their lies pointed out to them repeatedly, with no effect, since after all they're the ones who made up the lies -- why would they have any problem with those lies' naked and vicious dishonesty.

Anyone who doesn't understand who and what the FRC is -- and apparently that number includes most of our infotainment noozers -- needs to read John's post and check out his links, which unlike FRC's patented reams of phony footnotes, actually bring you to information.

I'd just like to quote John's conclusion:

Look, I'm sorry that some nut tried to go on a shooting rampage at FRC's headquarters - violence is never the answer, even if you are an officially designated hate group that routinely defames millions of Americans in order to further the discrimination and suffering they face daily. But one shooter's insanity doesn't change who you are, what you've said, and what you've done for over two decades.

Contrary to what FRC likes to claim, we don't think they're a hate group because they're Christians. We think they're a hate group because of how un-Christian they really are.

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Streams of Consciousness, Dec. 23

A couple days ago we reported on the smoldering controversy over hexavalent chromium, or chromium-6, seeping into most cities' drinking water in serious enough quantities to make the water carcinogenic. Yesterday California Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein asked the EPA to set national safety standards for chromium-6.

Meanwhile, concern is mounting across the country that drinking tap water regularly will increase the chances of getting stomach cancer and leukemia, while also increasing the risk of potentially fatal liver and kidney damage. The chemical industry and their Republican allies have vowed to fight any attempts to pass legislation taking away the freedom to pollute and the liberty of water consumers to poison themselves and their families if they decide to. That kind of Freedom and Liberty is very important to Republicans. In their universe, it's the heart and soul of the free market. You see, in GOP-land, those who can't afford bottled water deserve to die anyway-- and if enough people do die from drinking tap water, the survivors will drink something else instead... like Coca-Cola, beer... even urine is less toxic. Industries say it would be too expensive for them to keep chromium-6 out of the drinking water and they need it for tanning leather and making some stainless-steel products. You know what they say about the bottom line!

Let's take rubber-stamp Republican Congressman Lee Terry of Omaha, for example. Terry almost never varies from John Boehner. Their voting records are nearly indistinguishable, and both are committed to defending the freedom of chemical companies to poison the population. Omaha, alas, is one of the cities badly hit by the chromium-6 disaster. While the proposed limit in the state of California is .06 parts per billion, Omaha's water tested at 1.07 ppb-- not nearly as bad as Norman, Oklahoma's 12.90 ppb, but enough to kill plenty of Omaha's poor people in a variety of very unpleasant ways.

The chemical industry has given Rep. Terry $36,000 in thinly veiled bribes to keep him on the reservation and not have him do anything crazy-- like look out for his constituents back in Nebraska. In 2008, his constituents nearly threw him out of office; he beat Democrat Jim Esch by a mere 10,000 votes out of over 273,000 cast-- 52-48%. This year he did much better against Tom White, whom he beat 61-39%. Terry isn't doing anything about safe drinking water standards at all. Perhaps he thinks his seat will be safer if more working people just die.


Arsonists Prosecuting Firefighters

Krugman was talking about the fact that the the rating agencies, in sucking up to the pooh-bahs of finance, brought the current financial crisis on the world. He makes a great point, but I jumped right to Tom Coburn and his crazy right-wing Republican allies, particularly Mike Enzi (R-WY), selfishly and obstinately blocking health care for 9-11 first responders. Most of the Senate just stared at Coburn like the freak he is and then voted to pass the widely popular legislation. In fact, by the end of the day support was so overwhelming that Coburn was pressured by relatively saner Republicans to just back down and let it pass by unanimous consent.

The increasingly deranged and stubborn Coburn insisted the reimbursements for the firefighters and other first responders are "an entitlement," a bad word, not related in his mind to the fact that they actually are entitled to this help from society for the job they did on the front lines after the 9-11 disaster that Coburn did nothing to prevent. Coburn is also pissed off that the costs of the bill are being covered by closing foreign corporate tax loopholes, loopholes that Coburn favors.

And The Senate Ratifies START By A Landslide

After all that sturm und drang from Kyl and his cronies looking for another Waterloo for Obama, the Senate overwhelmingly ignored the dominant obstructionist faction of the Senate GOP caucus and approved the nonpartisan treaty between the U.S. and Russia that mandates new reductions in both nations' deployed strategic nuclear weapons. The final vote was 71-26, with 13 Republicans ignoring McConnell, McCain and DeMint and their hysterical politicization of national security. All the adult types among the Republicans voted for ratification.

And that was the end of the 111th Congress. Both houses adjourned. Here's a video montage of some of what was accomplished, although that Obama bullshit about Afghanistan and his and McConnell's tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires kind of spoils the whole thing:



GOP Front Groups Still Hope To Milk Homophobia For Donations

Yesterday President Obama signed the repeal of DADT, which passed by a wider margin in the Senate than anyone expected, even far right Republicans like Richard Burr (NC) and John Ensign (NV) abandoning Miss McConnell and the Mean Sisters, McCain and Graham-- two closet queens and a bitter, nasty old man-- to be party to history instead of getting run over by it.

But as Right Wing Watch pointed out, the Family Research Council, a Republican Party hate group, is already threatening to sue to prevent repeal from being enacted. They're in cahoots with McCain in trying to undermine implementation of the new law. And then there's this:



President Obama, after signing the bill yesterday, had something very different to say, something that will probably resonate more forcefully with normal Americans:

Sixty-six years ago, in the dense, snow-covered forests of Western Europe, Allied Forces were beating back a massive assault in what would become known as the Battle of the Bulge. And in the final days of fighting, a regiment in the 80th Division of Patton’s Third Army came under fire. The men were traveling along a narrow trail. They were exposed and they were vulnerable. Hundreds of soldiers were cut down by the enemy.

And during the firefight, a private named Lloyd Corwin tumbled 40 feet down the deep side of a ravine. And dazed and trapped, he was as good as dead. But one soldier, a friend, turned back. And with shells landing around him, amid smoke and chaos and the screams of wounded men, this soldier, this friend, scaled down the icy slope, risking his own life to bring Private Corwin to safer ground.

For the rest of his years, Lloyd credited this soldier, this friend, named Andy Lee, with saving his life, knowing he would never have made it out alone. It was a full four decades after the war, when the two friends reunited in their golden years, that Lloyd learned that the man who saved his life, his friend Andy, was gay. He had no idea. And he didn’t much care. Lloyd knew what mattered. He knew what had kept him alive; what made it possible for him to come home and start a family and live the rest of his life. It was his friend.

And Lloyd’s son is with us today. And he knew that valor and sacrifice are no more limited by sexual orientation than they are by race or by gender or by religion or by creed; that what made it possible for him to survive the battlefields of Europe is the reason that we are here today. That's the reason we are here today.

So this morning, I am proud to sign a law that will bring an end to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” It is a law-- this law I’m about to sign will strengthen our national security and uphold the ideals that our fighting men and women risk their lives to defend.

No longer will our country be denied the service of thousands of patriotic Americans who were forced to leave the military-- regardless of their skills, no matter their bravery or their zeal, no matter their years of exemplary performance-- because they happen to be gay. No longer will tens of thousands of Americans in uniform be asked to live a lie, or look over their shoulder, in order to serve the country that they love.

As Admiral Mike Mullen has said, “Our people sacrifice a lot for their country, including their lives. None of them should have to sacrifice their integrity as well.”