The white supremacist terrorist who shot and killed nine parishioners in Charleston was radicalized by a racist hate group that Family Research Council president Tony Perkins addressed in 2001.
Saturday a website surfaced that is believed to belong to Dylann Roof, the man who has confessed to killing nine parishioners at a Black church in Charleston. On the site is Roof’s “manifesto” – for lack of a better term – a statement of his racist beliefs.
“The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case,” Roof says. “It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right.”
He continues, writing that that discovery, “prompted me to type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?”
The Council of Conservative Citizens, designated a racist white nationalist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has nearly two dozen chapters across the United States. And it has its own “manifesto,” with statements like, “We believe the United States is a Christian country,” “The traditional family is the basic unit of human society,” and, “We believe the United States is a European country and that Americans are part of the European people.”
Under some of those beliefs, the Council of Conservative Citizens states:
“We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called ‘affirmative action’ and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.”
“We believe in the traditional family as the basic unit of human society and morality, and we oppose all efforts by the state and other powers to weaken the structure of the American family through toleration of sexual licentiousness, homosexuality and other perversions, mixture of the races, pornography in all forms, and subversion of the authority of parents.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center on Saturday responded to the discovery of Roof’s website. In, “Charleston shooter’s manifesto reveals hate group helped to radicalize him,” SPLC president Richard Cohen points to the 21-year old racist’s explanation of how he came to his beliefs, commenting, “We’re not surprised.” The SPLC also separately calls the Council of Conservative Citizens “Dylann Roof’s Gateway Into The World Of White Nationalism.”
Nor should we be surprised that the Southern Poverty Law Center has meticulously documented the actions of the Council of Conservative Citizens and the ties it has to almost two dozen politicians, almost entirely Republican politicians.
Then there are the ties the Council of Conservative Citizens has to Tony Perkins.
Today, Perkins is the president of the anti-gay hate group Family Research Council. He has intimate access to the media, mostly via Fox News, although it’s not uncommon to see him on other cable news networks, speaking against equality and for conservative “family values,” which in reality are neither.
Perkins espouses lies, like, as GLAAD reports, “gay young people ‘have a higher propensity to depression or suicide because of that internal conflict; homosexuals may recognize intuitively that their same-sex attractions are abnormal.‘”
But before that, Perkins from 1996 to 2004 was a Louisiana State Representative.
The SPLC reports that “in 2001, Perkins was photographed addressing a gathering of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens. The group, a direct descendent of the segregationist White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, has called African Americans a “retrograde species of humanity.†Perkins, who later denied knowledge of the group’s racist views, spoke in front of a Confederate flag (seen here, courtesy of Right Wing Watch).”
That Right Wing Watch article includes the image of Perkins, and reports on his speech, at which Perkins claims he “cannot remember speaking.”
Media Matters reports on an article in which Perkins “said he wasn’t aware of” the history of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which, given Perkins ties to KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, seems unlikely.
Joe Jervis notes “the CCC calls LGBT Americans ‘perverted sodomites.’ The SPLC also notes that the membership rolls of the Council Of Conservative Citizens ‘overlap greatly’ with those of the League Of The South, the racist group which recently distributed signs at an Alabama anti-gay marriage rally addressed by Roy Moore, whose return to the Alabama Supreme Court was bankrolled by the League’s former president.”
It was just a few short years ago that politicians, mostly Republican politicians, believed that racist views, like anti-gay views, were not only perfectly acceptable, but moral, even biblical.
On issues of equality, be it for Blacks or LGBT people, there’s never a question between what’s right and what’s wrong.
EARLIER:
‘They Weren’t Beating Up On Cops’: Huckabee Compares Charleston To Ferguson
White Supremacist Website, Manifesto, Photos Appearing To Belong To Charleston Shooter Surfaces
Breaking Video: In Court, Victims’ Family Members Tell Charleston Shooter ‘I Forgive You’
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Image via Last Rhodsian
Hat tip: TJ, Raw Story
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