Wednesday, September 07, 2016

Trump a featured speaker at upcoming summit of extreme anti-lgbt groups

Trump to put on the mantle of morality this weekend?

Those who continue to claim that Trump is a friend to the lgbt community deserves a swift kick.  Trump will be a featured speaker at the Family Research Council's "Values Voter Summit," which will be held this weekend.

The organization hosting the program, anti-lgbt hate group the Family Research Council, bragged earlier last month about attaining Trump as a speaker:


 The organizations gathering together for this mess have always claimed that they have been unfairly attacked for their "personal Christian beliefs" rather than the untrue and ugly claims they have made about the lgbt community. According to Right Wing Watch, this is a lie:


Here are just a few "Christian attributes" of the attendees:

Tony Perkins

As the president of the Family Research Council, the summit’s main sponsor, Tony Perkins heads the organization’s efforts to erode gay rights, reproductive rights and the separation of church and state.
Perkins himself frequently reflects the extreme views of his organization. He has:
  • Warned that LGBT rights advocates will launch a holocaust against Christians, placing those who oppose same-sex marriage into “boxcars.”

Peter Sprigg

Peter Sprigg is a senior fellow for policy at the Family Research Council, where he supports policies including criminalizing homosexuality and exporting homosexuals. Sprigg:
  • Advocated for gay relationships to be outlawed and met with “criminal sanctions,” calling homosexuality “objectively harmful to the people who engage in it and to society at large.”

And some of the rest:

 The American Family Association (another anti-lgbt hate group), another sponsor of the Values Voter Summit, likewise backed Texas in the Lawrence case, writing in the amicus brief that a law like Texas' could prevent the “injury caused to the public by same-sex sodomy” and would even protect the gay people it targeted by sparing them “illness, disease and death resulting from [their] conduct.” That same year, the AFA published an essay lamenting that the disappearance of sodomy laws showed that “Judeo-Christian views” were being abandoned in favor of “moral relativism.” In 2011, then-AFA spokesman Bryan Fischer said that homosexuality should be a “criminal offense.”

 . . .  Rick Santorum, who will have a speaking slot, has boasted of his opposition to the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision. Family Watch International, which is sponsoring a booth at the event, frequently works with some of the world’s most repressive governments to keep LGBT-friendly language out of UN documents and has supported harsh anti-gay legislation in Nigeria. Liberty Counsel, which will also be sponsoring a booth in the summit’s exhibit hall, backed Texas in the Lawrence case and defended a homosexuality ban in Malawi. Radical anti-LGBT activist Matt Barber said on a Liberty Counsel radio program he co-hosts that the U.S. should adopt a ban on “homosexual activist propaganda” similar to Russia’s. Fischer, the former AFA spokesman, also advocated enacting a similar law in the U.S.

As I pointed out in earlier posts, for groups and individuals who are always bleating their own "religious horns" or telling anecdotes of how morality and Christianity are under attack, they have been either conveniently silent about Trump's racially charged, offensive commentary or going out of their way to sugarcoat it. Of course, they themselves have made comments about lgbts equally eyebrow raising.

I  hope that the media can take a break from talking about Clinton's optics and  the non-scandals involving her emails or her foundation. They need to devote at least  a little time on the giant contradictions involving a presidential candidate promising to be a friend to lgbts while he is kissing up to groups and people who can't stand us or the ground we walk.


Top photo courtesy of Religious Dispatches.

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