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.

#

The concept of a "culture of inclusion" really isn't that complicated. Home Depot's spokesman explains it simply and elegantly

One of the great things about Home Depot's refusal to knuckle under to AFA's homophobic crusade is the obvious corollary that the "culture of inclusion" the company believes in isn't just sane social policy, it's also good for business!

“To forbid our associates to have any involvement in pride festivals would run counter to the company’s culture of inclusion. We’re not going to discriminate against anyone because of race, religion or sexual orientation.”

-- Home Depot spokesman Stephen Holmes, quoted in the Hatewatch post "Religious Right Group Slurs Home Depot in Anti-Gay Attack"

by Ken

I just wanted to finish up on the Hatewatch report (link above) I referenced last night on Home Depot's pushback against a smear campaign by the infamous American Family Association, which included the above quote from spokesman Stephen Holmes, which continues to arouse my admiration and awe. It's amazing how simple the concept of a "culture of inclusion" is when you get down to it.

Now the AFA is not to be confused with the Family Research Council, whose current homophobic bullying in Michigan Howie wrote about this morning. But the organizations do share a determination common to the Christian Right: that the family can be used as society's fundamental breeding ground for ignorance and hatred, these groups' ever-reliable resources as well as specially cherished goals.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has long taken as its mission the tracking of hate groups in America, in particular those with links to violence, and it's indeed reassuring to see its estimable Hatewatch blog ("Keeping an Eye on the Radical Right"; today, for example, Hatewatch features a report by Heidi Beirich, "Neo-Nazi Official Patrolling Arizona Border Lauds Violence") targeting the AFA's campaign against Home Depot.

As I mentioned last night, the AFA crusade tries to conjure menace with the shocking revelation: "The Home Depot has chosen to sponsor and participate in numerous gay pride parades and festivals.” This is what Stephen Holmes was responding to in his lovely statement.

But as the Hatewatch post points out, the AFA goes to considerable lengths to manufacture the revulsion toward Home Depot it's hoping to arouse.

AFA’s announcement strongly implies – with clever wording and misleading “evidence” – that the home-improvement retailer is helping gay sexual predators stalk children.

A letter posted on AFA’s website and signed by its president, Tim Wildmon, declares that a photograph “taken during recent homosexual events sponsored by The Home Depot show[s] children being encouraged to visit gay sex websites.” In the photo, children presumably attending the Southern Maine Pride Festival and parade in June, are seen holding orange Home Depot cups with small red-and-white flags stuck in them. The AFA caption reads, “The flags in these Home Depot cups promote a gay website which proclaims itself as ‘the men’s social group for men who have sex with men.’” The caption goes on, “The cups were given to children by The Home Depot gay parade marchers, while homosexual activists followed up by introducing them to gay sex websites."

Hatewatch notes that AFA never actually accuses Home Depot of being involved with these scarifying flags. "But," the writers note, "AFA nevertheless concludes, 'The Home Depot has no problem aligning itself with gay activist groups who target children with a pro-homosexual message.'”

Hatewatch became curious about those dreaded flags, which the post reports are unreadable in the accompanying photo. What's more, "AFA conveniently never identifies the offending website -- and for good reason, as it turns out."

The flags, Hatewatch has learned, were distributed by an Augusta, Maine, group called Just Guys, which provides safe sex counseling, HIV testing, social support and other resources for gay men. Its meetings are on the calendar of MaineGeneral Health, Maine’s third-largest health care system. And just for good measure, the front page of justguys.info prominently displays a warning:

“This website contains HIV/STD prevention messages that may not be appropriate for all audiences. Since HIV infection and Sexually Transmitted Diseases are spread primarily through sexual practices or by sharing needles, prevention messages and programs may address these topics. If you are not seeking such information or may be offended by such materials, this website may contain pages which you may not wish to visit. Thank you.”

Not exactly the hallmarks of drooling pederasts.

Just Guys director Lew Alessio acknowledged that his organization distributed the flags at the southern Maine festival. The message on the flags said simply, “Gay Pride, Safe Pride,” and then the web address – the promotional phrase AFA cited wasn’t on them. The obvious conclusion: AFA representatives went to the website to find the promotional phrase — and thus knew perfectly well that justguys.info is not a “gay sex website,” and that it doesn’t target children in any way.

“All of our written material must be approved by the review board of the Maine Center for Disease Control,” Alessio told Intelligence Report. “While we gave out thousands of trinkets with various safer sex/gay pride messages on them, every single message was approved by the MCDC in advance of the event.”

A bit different from the impression the AFA screed was clearly trying to plant in readers' imaginations, of drooling preverts trying to lure good Christian children into visiting a gay porn site. You may or may not be surprised to learn: "A representative of the American Family Association, contacted by Hatewatch, said no spokespersons were available to comment."

The post also recalls a famous previous AFA crusade, when the group was still headed by Tim Wildmon's father, Donald: an attempted boycott of Ford for what the post describes as "similar pro-gay offenses." In the mind of the AFA's Bryan Fischer, whose title is "director of issue analysis for government and public policy," “Ford Motor Company eventually surrendered, and re-focused its energy on making automobiles instead of retooling American culture.” (Hatewatch notes that Fischer "has recently argued that homosexuality should be prohibited by law, that Muslims should be banned from the U.S. military, and that executing couples engaged in “sexual immorality” might help the nation renew its “commitment to follow God.” He has argued that Adolf Hitler was gay and that World War II Nazi stormtroopers were actually a sinister, elite gay fighting force.)

Unfortunately for Fischer, history doesn't support his bravado. Dispassionate observers agree that Ford weathered the campaign without compromising its corporate principles in the direction of that same culture of inclusion -- so abhorrent to people who think like the AFA. And then Hatewatch quotes a colleague who's one of my favorite people, one of the wisest people I know.

Bob Witeck, CEO of Witeck Combs Communications, which specializes in marketing to gay consumers, said most anti-gay organizations have abandoned consumer boycotts as a strategy for a simple reason: They haven’t worked. Few other religious-right or anti-gay organizations have joined AFA’s call.

“To the best of my knowledge, no corporation has evidenced any drop or loss of revenue from boycotts of this sort,” Witeck told Hatewatch. To the extent they are still used, the primary goal seems to be assuring the boycotting organization’s base that their contributions are making a difference, he said. “You take a cause, you do it, then you declare victory and then everyone believes their money was well-invested.”

The real net effect of anti-gay boycotts, says Witeck, is like listening to “one hand clapping. They really don’t change corporate behaviors.”

#