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Anti-Gay Groups Blame LGBT Community For Family Research Council Shooting

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Several anti-gay groups and their representatives wasted no time in actually blaming the LGBT community and/or liberals and progressives for this morning’s shooting at the Family Research Council‘s (FRC) Washington, D.C. headquarters, during which a security guard was shot in the arm. Others merely used the event as an opportunity to position themselves and the anti-gay lobby as victims of the left or, like the folks at the Manhattan Declaration, which advocates for bible-based anarchy over the law, used the event to gain more followers. NOM, the National Organization For Marriage, the American Family Association (AFA), Liberty Counsel, Gary Bauer’s American Values, Peter LaBarbera, and even bloggers like Erick Erickson took time out to blame the entire left, or the LGBT community, for today’s shooting.

And while an astonishing 27 LGBT organizations immediately condemned the shooting, can anyone recall the same response from the right when right wing madmen attack the left?

Brian Brown, president of NOM, the National Organization For Marriage, issued a threatening statement, demanding that “labeling pro-marriage groups as ‘hateful’ must end.”

“Today’s attack is the clearest sign we’ve seen that labeling pro-marriage groups as ‘hateful’ must end,” said Brian Brown, President of NOM. “The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled the Family Research Council a ‘hate group’ for its pro-marriage views, and less than a day ago the Human Rights Campaign issued a statement calling FRC a ‘hate group’—they even specified that FRC hosts events in Washington, DC, where today’s attack took place.”

“NOM has always condemned all violence and vilification connected to our ongoing national debate about the meaning and definition of marriage,” Brown stated. “For too long national gay rights groups have intentionally marginalized and ostracized pro-marriage groups and individuals by labeling them as ‘hateful’ and ‘bigoted’ — such harmful and dangerous labels deserve no place in our civil society and NOM renews its call today for gay rights groups and the Southern Poverty Law Center to withdraw such incendiary rhetoric from a debate that involves millions of good Americans,” added Brown.

Brown concluded: “Violence is never the answer, and on that we all must agree, or risk the consequences.”

Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out called Brown’s statement, “grotesque, unseemly, and exploitative.”

Bryan Fischer, the public face of the certified anti-gay hate group, American Family Association, said via Twitter:

 

Liberty Counsel attorney and Liberty University dean Matt Barber wrote via Twitter:

 

 

 

 

In “Anti-Gay Group Responds To FRC Shooting With Request To Sign Anti-Gay Pledge,” Joe Jervis reports:

Backers of the Manhattan Declaration have issued a press release about the FRC shooting. The message closes by asking for more signatures on their anti-gay pledge, whose signees vow to commit disobey any laws that protect LGBT Americans.

Today, the news broke of a shooting at the Family Research Council, a think tank in Washington, D.C. that promotes faith, family, and freedom. The FRC has been a friend of the Manhattan Declaration from our very first day. Though the details remain unclear, it seems a security guard prevented the shooter from venturing beyond the lobby. At some point in the intervention, he was shot. Initial reports are that the guard will be okay. Such heroic action warrants a thanks beyond mere words. But, for now, words will suffice. Thank you for your bravery, Leo. And for the part you play in the pursuit of a more free, more faithful nation.Sign the Declaration.

Erick Erickson, founder of RedState, and, amazingly, a CNN contributor, made up a few “facts”:

The Family Research Council is one of my favorite organizations. I consider Tony Perkins a friend and he and his staff are in my prayers today, as they should be yours. … It is not a political statement, but a fact that for years the left inside and outside the media has ridiculed the family values the Family Research Council defends. It is not a political statement, but a fact that had this been at an abortion clinic or the Human Rights Campaign’s headquarters instead of the Family Research Council’s headquarters, we’d be in for a week of handwringing in the media about homophobia and right wing nuts. But because the Family Research Council promotes the values shared by a majority of Americans, but only a minority of the left in and outside the media, this story will move on off the radar. Instead, the Human Rights Campaign, which aggressively supports gay rights, will go on calling the Family Research Council a hate group, the media will give the shooting a passing reference, and it will all be forgotten until Brian Ross and ABC News can figure out a way to pin it on the tea party. … This is further typified by disgust at Chick-Fil-A for promoting traditional values, but delight with Ben & Jerry’s promoting “correct” values. That’s not a political point. That’s a fact.

Of course, Peter LaBarbera couldn’t resist:

 

 

And Catholic League president Bill Donohue, ignoring the joint statement of over two dozen LGBT organizations condemning today’s shooting, writes:

Early reports indicate that the motives of the shooter are cause for serious concern. One source told Fox News that the suspect “made statements regarding their policies, and then opened fire with a gun striking a security guard.” After he was apprehended the suspect said, “It was not about you. It was about what this place stands for.”
Is this what we have come to? Has the environment become so toxic that a faith-based organization becomes a target of an attack simply because it holds traditional values on sexuality, marriage and life? Unfortunately it seems that this may be the case.
We hope that this incident is taken seriously. There are still a couple of months to go before the election and signs indicate that they will be contentious. Now is the time for people of goodwill to call for civility and condemn this attack.

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News

Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report

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6 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.

“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”

“Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”

NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).

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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.

38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”

“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”

62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”

NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”

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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”

Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.

“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.

But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”

A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won

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10 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.

In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”

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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.

In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.

“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”

Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.

“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”

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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”

He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.

Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.

After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”

“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter

One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.

Watch the video above or at this link.

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‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism

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13 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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President Joe Biden made rare, unscheduled remarks from the White House Thursday morning, denouncing the recent violent protests on college campuses, and telling Americans there is “no place” for antisemitism anywhere across the nation. He also denounced “hate speech” and “racism,” while declaring his support for the right to peacefully protest.

“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”

Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”

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“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” the President also said, praising the ideal of peaceful protests, which he said are in the “best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”

“But,” he added, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”

America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”

“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”

“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”

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“Look. It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

“I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions in America. We respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence. Without destruction, without hate, and within the law. And I’ll make no mistake. As President, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you the American people. My obligation to the Constitution.”

The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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