A Treasury of Wingnut Reactions to AFA & FRC Being Listed as Hate Groups

There’s no good place to start, and I’m coming back after a long weekend which involved my laptop, a mug of coffee being spilled on it, and a magical screw that used to be in the laptop, but is now in my pocket, so let’s just jump in and look at the wingnut reactions to the Southern Poverty Law Center adding the Family Research Council and the American Family Association to their list of anti-gay hate groups.

Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage may indeed be illiterate.  He is very upset about NOM being added to the list, which is hilarious, because NOM wasn’t added to the list.  Here’s what he said:

“This is an absurd distraction emanating from a once-great organization’s real mission — with all the actual hate groups out there, how can Southern Poverty Law Center stoop so low?

This report is not an attack on NOM but on the majority of Americans who believe that to make a marriage you need a husband and wife. It is also further proof of what NOM has been saying: today’s gay marriage movement is no longer about tolerance, live or let live — it’s about driving out dissenting voices from the public square.

Gay marriage now serves as the tip of the spear to a new campaign to demonize and generate hatred against those who adhere to traditional views of sex and marriage.

Regular readers of NOM’s work know how we characterize gay people: those who support our vision of marriage, we welcome to join our work. For gay marriage advocates (the majority of whom are not gay) we say: we think you are wrong, and we will fight for our right to vote for marriage in the public square.”

Yeah, Brian, please learn to read good and do other stuff good too. You’re definitely a disturbed bigot, and so is Maggie Gallagher, but y’all aren’t on the list yet.  You were profiled in the report as an anti-gay group, but the report specifically explained, in English, that those listed on the official hate groups list were those with asterisks [looks like this:  *] next to them.

The next several quotes are via Alvin McEwen, who did the hard work of writing about this during the holiday weekend, while the rest of us were being lazy.  Here’s Robert Knight, whose Coral Ridge Ministries somehow managed to stay off the list.  Robert is very upset and says that the SPLC are the REAL HATURS:

“No organization better defines what a hate group is all about than the Southern Poverty Law Center,” said Robert Knight, Washington correspondent for Coral Ridge Ministries. “Smearing legitimate groups merely for disagreeing about homosexuality is a very hateful act.”

“Lumping Christian groups in with violent, racist gangs is a form of ‘bracketing,’ a political tactic described in the gay strategy manual ‘After the Ball.’ It’s guilt by association and it’s meant to intimidate,” Knight told WND.

This is known as the “I know you are, but what am I” defense, and it is very popular with childish wingnuts. But no, Robert, the SPLC specifically stated that merely disagreeing with homosexuality was not enough to land a group on the list. One of the prerequisites is a tendency to lie about LGBT people, and all of the groups on the hate group list [as well as your own] lie about LGBT people with feverish abandon.

In that same piece from WingNutDaily, here is some whining from King Hater Tony Perkins:

“The Left’s smear campaigns of conservatives is being driven by the clear evidence that the American public is losing patience with their radical policy agenda as seen in the recent election and in the fact that every state, currently more than thirty, that has had the opportunity to defend the natural definition of marriage has done so,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council.

That’s some wishful thinking, since every poll taken on gay rights over the past twenty years has shown us progressively winning over a few more percentage points every year, all the way to where we are now, with support for marriage equality being the majority position. But then again, people like Tony Perkins lie to support their agendas.

Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Coalition:

“We are going to form a coalition of organizations to lobby Congress to withhold funds from SPLC,” Christian Anti-Defamation Coalition head Gary L. Cass told WND. “We will also demand Congress restrict federal law enforcement from relying on the biased SPLC reports, like the discredited ‘Report on Right-Wing Extremism’ SPLC wrote for the Department of Homeland Security.”

The SPLC doesn’t receive federal funds, dingus.

Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America, who is also inexplicably not on the list:

Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, contended that SPLC is more focused on advancing a radical political agenda than on combating hatred.

“This might be an opportunity to point out who are actually filled with hate and bigotry,” said Wright. “If they were to judge according to actions, they would have to have a special section for homosexual groups that vandalize and threaten people who oppose the homosexual agenda. We’ve had death threats against us posted openly on websites because of our work to uphold traditional marriage.”

“It’s the homosexual groups that have violated and invaded churches, vandalized homes and cars, that instigate death threats against people who are simply trying to uphold traditional values,” Wright observed.

The Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg has called for gays to be deported from this country. The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer is such a frothing hatemonger that his work almost singlehandedly landed him on the list. Note that Wendy is also using the second grade level “I know you are but what am I?” defense. She bitches about “death threats,” but cannot point to a single person killed or taking his own life due to anti-fundamentalist-wingnut bias, yet continues to ignore the bodycount of gay and lesbian schoolchildren, as it interferes with her slavish devotion to her incorrect worldview.

Isn’t it cute how present day haters and bigots never think their hatred and bigotry is like the hatred and bigotry of their direct ancestors?  People:  Tony Perkins bought David Duke’s mailing list for a reason.  On some level, he understands that his group and other groups like his are connected to white supremacist groups of days past via a direct line of inheritance.

Anyway, Bryan Fischer has also weighed in, claiming that all the religious right lies about gay people that have been exposed are actually true, because Bryan Fischer is a liar.  Whether he knows he’s lying or not is open to discussion.  That’s all for now.  There are more out there, but this post is long already, so I’ll post some more tomorrow!