Anti-lgbt hate group removed from list of Connecticut approved charities for payroll deductions.

AFA gets smacked down by Connecticut

It's no doubt that the following item will be exploited as an example of how Christians are supposedly being "persecuted" in America:

From the Hartford Courant:

Mississippi-based Christian organization is being dropped from a list of approved charities for state employees after the group failed to provide a copy of its anti-discrimination policy.

Timothy K. Newtown, chair of the Connecticut State Employee Campaign Committee, wrote to the group's president, Tim Wildmon, on Thursday notifying them they were being removed. The program allows state employees to direct payroll deductions to a charity of their choice.

"I am grateful for the committee's unanimous vote to remove AFA from the state charitable campaign – and I'm proud to live in a state that broadly prohibits discrimination, whether based on an individual's race, color, religion, age, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, familial status, national origin, ancestry or disability," Lembo, who is openly gay, said in a written statement.

Apparently, this was a unanimous vote of the Connecticut State Employees’ Campaign (CSEC) Committee. But before the vote, the AFA chose to focus on Lembo's sexual orientation:

 Lembo had asked the group for information regarding its non-discrimination policy and the group responded by asking its members to contact Lembo for attacking their group’s Biblical beliefs and what they saw as his attempt to diminish those beliefs by asking for information about discrimination. Lembo has said most of the communications were uninformed.

Not that I'm telling anyone anything that they aren't aware of but for the record, the American Family Association is a Southern Poverty Law Center designated hate group. According to SPLC:

The AFA has been extremely vocal over the years in its opposition to LGBT rights, marriage equality and allowing gay men and lesbians to serve in the military. The group's arguments are filled with claims that equate homosexuality with pedophilia and argue that there's a "homosexual agenda" afoot that is set to bring about the downfall of American (and ultimately, Western) civilization. In one October 2004 article, the AFA Journal suggested that gay influences are leading to a "grotesque culture" that will include "quick encounters in the middle school boys' restroom."

For years, until 2010, the AFA had a section on its website that supposedly exposed "The Homosexual Agenda." There, a reader could find articles and other AFA publications that claimed LGBT people were trying to force the acceptance of homosexuality on children through sex education programs in schools; condemned companies like Disney for supporting LGBT rights and programming; and, also until 2010, featured a particularly noxious booklet the AFA had published in 1994. That booklet, Homosexuality in America: Exposing the Myths, included the bogus research of thoroughly discredited psychologist Paul Cameron as a source. One of the publication's authors, Richard Howe, used Cameron's "research" to claim that LGBT people don't live as long as heterosexuals, that they're more promiscuous and that the "disgusting details of the homosexual lifestyle explain why so many diseases are present in the homosexual community." Another claim was that "[p]rominent homosexual leaders and publications have voiced support for pedophilia, incest, sadomasochism, and even bestiality."

The question shouldn't be should the AFA be included on the list of groups Connecticut employees can donate to via payroll deductions. The question should be how in the world did the AFA get on this list in the first place.