Focus on The Family staffers were concerned about hate group leader's anti-gay rhetoric

Tony Perkins

Focus on the Family has just written a piece attacking GLAAD for its Commentator Accountability Project.

You will remember that GLAAD began this project as a way of educating the media on the true rhetoric of religious right groups - rhetoric that anti-gay spokesmen are not questioned on by the mainstream media because they put on another face when talking to news organizations like CNN and MSNBC.

In the piece, Focus on the Family's also defends Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council against the group Faithful America. Faithful America recently began a campaign asking that Chris Matthews of Hardball stop featuring Perkins as an expert on his show. Focus on the Family claims that Faithful America and GLAAD wants to silence people like Perkins for supposedly standing up for Christian values:

*By “anti-gay activist,” GLAAD means anyone who believes and speaks out on the truth that God designed sex to unite a man and a woman in marriage, ruling out sexual activity outside that union, with children being a possible result.

But Jeremy Hooper from Goodasyou.org just published something which exposes Focus on the Family as hypocrites. Apparently in January, a staffer from the organization lodged some concerns about Perkins' rhetoric in an email to Hooper:

Hooper says this about revealing the email:

You know what, Focus on the Family staffer? I did stay tuned to see if these concerns made their way to the public. I held up my end of the bargain. But while I was waiting for that to happen, a funny (but not funny "ha ha") thing occurred. I instead watched as Focus on the Family personality after Focus on the Family personality flat-out lied about GLAAD CAP, completely overlooked the "approach and tone" that led someone like Tony on the list, and acted as if we LGBT activists are absolute crazypants opponents of free speech for having and expressing these concerns. I waited patiently, sitting on information that I knew to be true, in hopes that some of you would have the fortitude to publicly talk about reasonable concerns that I know that you know to be true as well.

. . . Even though "off record" was never requested, I never intended to make this public. I never intended to burn down whatever personal bridges had been forged over the years in spite of the deep political differences. I never wanted to force Focus on the Family to go public with their own conversations of concern about Tony Perkins' "approach and tone." The startling lack of ethics and hypocrisy that Focus on the Family has shown towards GLAAD CAP, a project with which I have intimate familiarity, forced my hand.

It is pretty much hypocritical for Focus on the Family to attack GLAAD and Faithful America for lodging concerns about Perkins' anti-gay rhetoric when some in the organization itself has done the same thing.

And Hooper deserves a lot of kudos for exposing this hypocrisy.