Better Know A Hate Group: Tony Perkins And The Family Research Council

Earlier this month, a gunman shot and wounded a guard employed by the Family Research Council at their Washington, D.C. headquarters. The shooting was wrong, evil, and cowardly, and anti-gay organizations and hate groups like Tony Perkins‘ FRC took license by attacking the LGBT community and our allies. But these groups also used the shooting to attack an American icon of equality and civil rights, the Southern Poverty Law Center, by claiming that the SPLC’s designation of “hate group” gave license to the shooter. Of course, that’s false.

On August 17, two days after an in response to the shooting, and to the lies that continually are vomited from groups like the Family Research Council and other anti-gay hate groups, I wrote:

Yesterday I turned 50 years old. Today, I made a donation of $100 (I wish it could be more) to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in honor of my father, a man who hated inequality and, after years of being a conservative, and a libertarian, grew increasingly displeased with the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan pushed him over the edge and my father ultimately became a Democrat. He died after a long battle with cancer in 2004. I think this would make him happy.

And so, in honor of my dad, and of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 41 years of fighting hate and inequality, starting Monday we will begin a new series, the “Hate Group QOTD,” or, quote of the day.

Each day, Monday through Friday, we’ll share with you a quote from a hate group leader that symbolizes why their organization is listed among the SPLC’s active anti-gay hate groups.

It’s my hope that you’ll share these quotes, which, no doubt, you’ll find offensive, with as many folks as you can, so we can expose the anti-gay hate and lies that these hate groups spread.

Remember, groups like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, and others, like Scott Lively’s Abiding Truth Ministries and Mission: America, are hate groups not because of the hate they spread, but because of the lies they spread.

While we didn’t start as promised last week (you can thank Congressman Todd Akin for the delay; we wrote about 30 articles on the topic,) we are beginning today, but we’re calling this series, “Better Know A Hate Group.” Today is Day One.

Here, via the American icon of equality and civil rights, the Southern Poverty Law Center, an excellent example of why Tony Perkins and his anti-gay hate group buddies — along with groups toeing the line of becoming anti-gay hate groups, like NOM, the National Organization For Marriage — hate the SPLC. An introduction to Family Research Council President Tony Perkins:

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 — Senate Majority Leader 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 the 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.