Anti-Gay Group Leader Frothing Over 'Hate Group' Label Was Totally Gay-Married To David Duke

Tony Perkins, the head of the extreme anti-gay hate group the Family Research Council, says the Southern Poverty Law Center has blood on its hands after a pro-gay crazy guy came to the FRC's DC office and tried to shoot up all the Christianists. Why is this the SPLC's fault? Because the SPLC has been tracking the FRC as a "hate group" for years, mostly because they keep saying gay people should die, and according to Tony Perkins, this gave "license" to said crazy dude to murder them. Many very serious thinkers in the mainstream media have agreed with Perkins (this time only) because how on earth could the SPLC lump in "mainstream conservatives" like the Family Research Council with such luminous dignitaries as former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard (and now "mainstream conservative" himself!) David Duke? Oh, well, quite easily, as it turns out, seeing as how Tony Perkins and David Duke are basically doing sex in each other's bottoms every time their eyes meet.

 Joe.My.God has the SPLC deets:

In 1996, while managing the U.S. Senate campaign of Woody Jenkins against Mary Landrieu, Perkins paid $82,500 to use the mailing list of former Klan chieftain David Duke. The campaign was fined $3,000 (reduced from $82,500) after Perkins and Jenkins filed false disclosure forms in a bid to hide their link to Duke. Five years later, on May 17, 2001, Perkins gave a speech to the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white supremacist group that has described black people as a “retrograde species of humanity.” Perkins claimed not to know the group’s ideology at the time, but it had been widely publicized in Louisiana and the nation, because in 1999 — two years before Perkins’ speech to the CCC — Republican House Speaker Trent Lott had been embroiled in a national scandal over his ties to the group. GOP chairman Jim Nicholson then urged Republicans to avoid the CCC because of its “racist views.” The Duke incident surfaced again in local press in 2002, when Perkins ran for the Republican nomination for the Senate, dooming his campaign to a fourth-place finish in the primaries.

Remind us, Dana Milbank, about how terrible it is to lump the FRC in with the KKK?

I disagree with the Family Research Council’s views on gays and lesbians. But it’s absurd to put the group, as the law center does, in the same category as Aryan Nations, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Stormfront and the Westboro Baptist Church. The center says the FRC “often makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science.” Exhibit A in its dossier is a quote by an FRC official from 1999 (!) saying that “gaining access to children has been a long-term goal of the homosexual movement.”

Offensive, certainly. But in the same category as the KKK?

To answer your question? Yes.

[ Joe.My.God / WaPo ]