Mike Huckabee and Congressional leaders to attend conference with hate group

The anti-gay Massachusetts group Mass Resistance is in a bragging mood.

Apparently its leader, Brian Camenker, has been asked to co-run a workshop on How to counter the homosexual extremist movement during the conservative "Take Back America" conference next month.

You do know Mass Resistance, don't you? One of the officially designated anti-gay hate groups as deemed by the Southern Law Poverty Center.

Mass Resistance is the group behind the David Parker situation (in which they and Parker orchestrated a phony moral panic against Estabrook Elementary School) and the fallacious "Fistgate" mess that came back to haunt President Obama appointee Kevin Jennings; unsuccessfully I might point out.

Co-hosting this workshop will be a perennial favorite of mine, The Holy Bullies and Headless Monster Misinformer of the Year for 2008 Matt Barber.

Barber, employed by the anti-gay Liberty Counsel, has done so many things to "endear" himself to the lgbt community.

Originally, he was fired from AllState Insurance for anti-gay columns he wrote. Although Barber claimed to have written them on his own time, it was alleged that he used company equipment to do so. Also he did involve the company in his nonsense by listing the fact that he was an employee in his columns.

Barber parlayed that furor into becoming a spokesman for Concerned Women for America, where he scrapped with folks like Wayne Besen and Keith Boykin on coast to coast television, despite often times being in way over his head. And now, he has this position at Liberty Counsel as the director of Cultural Affairs.

Barber's attacks on the lgbt community have bordered on fanatic and loony, including (information taken from Sourcewatch):

A January 2007 column on gays in the military: "Move over National Guard and Green Berets – make way for the avant-garde and Lavender Berets."

A March 2007 column bashed "left-wing storm troopers" and referenced a "6-foot-4-inch homosexual linebacker who likes to wear lipstick and high-heels."

A May 2007 WorldNetDaily article quoted Barber describing cross-dressers as people who "get their jollies from wearing a dress, high heels and lipstick."

Barber asserted that former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey "admitted in his memoirs that he fancied doing the toilet bowl tango with strange men at truck stops."

In a column, Barber told the story of a "burly truck driver" who "got twitterpated by the way pantyhose felt against his skin and eventually made the self-determination that he was, in fact, a woman trapped in a man's body," which somehow means that "parents may well be forced to explain to Junior why Ms. Johnson at parochial school has a five o'clock shadow, calves like Schwarzenegger, an Adam's apple the size of a golf ball and is stuffed into a miniskirt like a 10-pound turkey in a 5-pound bag." He further asserted that a federal ban on discrimination against gays and transsexuals means that female employees will be "forced to share bathroom facilities with any male employee who got his jollies from wearing a dress."

Then there was this column comparing lgbts and progressives in general to idol worshippers and child sacrificers of Biblical times.

For comedic purposes, I would love to be at that workshop held by Camenker and Barber.

The two will be telling such conservative dignitaries as Mike Huckabee, Phyllis Schafly,Rick Scarborough, Mat Staver, Rep. Tom McClintock, Rep. Michele Bachmann, and others how to lie on the lgbt community.

As if these folks really needed any urging or help in that department.

But one has to wonder why how do they feel about attending the same conference as an officially designated hate group.

I don't think Huckabee has any problems with that.

According to him, lgbts aren't having our civil rights violated because we haven't had our heads sufficiently cracked in.

Editor's note - Before anyone gets it twisted, the Southern Poverty Law Center does not deem groups as anti-gay hate organizations simply because said organizations work from the belief that homosexuality is a sin. The SPLC site clearly says:

Anti-gay groups are organizations that go beyond mere disagreement with homosexuality by subjecting gays and lesbians to campaigns of personal vilification.

Related articles:

Mike Huckabee - definitely not 'pro-sodomy' but extremely 'pro-ignorant'

'Fistgate' and President Obama - religious right pushes a pitiful attempt of guilt by association

The legend of the Mad Dad of Massachusetts or how to distort a situation religious-right style

The 2008 Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters Misinformers of the Year Awards