Rand Paul Presidential Campaign Teaser Features Him Speaking At A Top Anti-Gay Conference

Rand Paul just quietly released a video announcing his run for the presidency, but most of the clips of him speaking are from one of the most anti-gay conferences in America.

Ted Cruz chose to use a university founded by the virulently anti-gay Jerry Falwell as the backdrop for his 2016 presidential campaign announcement, and now his senatorial colleague, Rand Paul, has chosen something similar.

While the Republican U.S. Senator from Kentucky has yet to formally announce his candidacy for president, last week he announced that this Tuesday he would be making a major announcement, and late Sunday evening Rand Paul released a teaser video of the campaign.

But just like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul too is cozying up to anti-gay religious conservatives in his new “teaser” video.

In the video, Senator Paul, a 52-year old ophthalmologist wearing a Brooks Brothers’ dress shirt, positions himself as a different kind of Republican leader. In fact, that’s the video’s title.

The video opens with clips of pundits supposedly heralding the Tea Party and libertarian hero, and then cuts to Sen. Paul stating, “to fix Washington we can’t have business as usual,” but it shows him speaking at this year’s the Conservative Political Action Convention.

CPAC is one of the nation’s most anti-gay political conventions. They won’t even allow the Log Cabin Republicans or, before they went under, GOProud, the former gay Tea Party group, to speak. The conference always attracts leaders from the far right, and Christian evangelical activists, like Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins or American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, to name just a few.

Ironically, in another clip of Senator Paul speaking at CPAC, he can be heard saying “Congress should live under the laws they pass.” He calls for kicking out of Congress those who don’t.

But Senator Rand Paul’s presidential candidacy itself is technically illegal if he runs while also running for re-election.

How’s that for hypocrisy?

But wait, there’s more.

In another clip, Paul says, “Liberal policies have failed our inner cities.”

And by “inner cities,” you know he means Black people – the very people Sen. Paul thinks business owners should be allowed to discriminate against.

Rand Paul pretty much distanced himself from the “religious freedom” bills in Indiana and Arkansas last week, but he did tell Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting network that America needs evangelical Christian “tent revivals” to heal the “moral crisis” created by same-sex marriage.

A “different kind of Republican leader”? Rand Paul just proved he’s the same old washed up anti-gay pro-discrimination religious zealot – and the same kind of Republican “leader” as all the rest.

The video closes with a kind of “Mad Men”-esque image, which, considering the GOP would like to take the country back a half-century or more, makes perfect sense.

Watch:

One last note. On Twitter, Sen. Rand Paul is now Dr. Rand Paul. Kind of a slap in the face to all Kentuckians who voted for him.

Stay tuned – we’ll have Dr. Paul’s actual official announcement here tomorrow when it happens, live.

 

Image: Screenshot via YouTube