This weekend, nearly every major GOP presidential candidate, along with the top two Republicans in the House of Representatives, will speak at the Values Voter Summit, an annual gathering of the leaders of the movement to integrate fundamentalist Christianity and American politics.
The candidates - Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich - and the congressmen - House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor - will join a who's who of the far Right at the event. The organizers of the Values Voter Summit and many of its prominent attendees are on the frontlines of removing hard-won rights for gay and lesbian Americans, restricting women's access to reproductive healthcare, undermining the free exercise rights of non-Christian religions and breaking down the wall of separation between church and state.
In perhaps the starkest illustration of how far even mainstream Republican candidates are willing to go to appease the Religious Right, Mitt Romney is scheduled to speak immediately before the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer, a man whose record of hate speech should be shocking by any standard. Along with regularly denigrating gays and lesbians, Muslims, and other minority groups, Fischer has no love for Romney's Mormon faith. In a radio program last week, Fischer insisted that Mormons have no right to religious freedom under the First Amendment and falsely claimed that the LDS Church still sanctions polygamy.
People For the American Way has called on GOP presidential candidates appearing at the conference to denounce Fischer's bigotry. Last year, PFAW issued a similar call to attendees, which was met with silence.
The following is a guide to some of the individuals with whom the leaders of the GOP will be rubbing shoulders at the Values Voter Summit this year.
Bryan Fischer
Bryan Fischer is the Director of Issues Analysis at the American Family Association, which is a sponsor of the Values Voter Summit. Fischer acts as the chief spokesman for the group and also hosts its flagship radio program, Focal Point, on which he has interviewed a number of prominent figures including Bachmann, Gingrich, Santorum and Mike Huckabee.
On his radio program and in blog posts, Fischer frequently expresses unmitigated bigotry toward a number of minority groups, including gays and lesbians, Muslim Americans, Native Americans, low-income African Americans and Mormons.
Fischer has:
At a speech at last year's Values Voter Summit, Fischer said that if Christians don't get involved in politics, they "make a deliberate decision to turn over the running of the United States government to atheists and pagans." Of the gay rights movement, he warned, "We are going to have to choose, as a nation, between the homosexual agenda and freedom, because the two cannot coexist."
Tony Perkins
Tony Perkins is president of the Family Research Council, the main organizer of this weekend's summit. Perkins leads the group's efforts against gay rights, abortion rights and church/state separation.
The FRC famously expressed its hostility to religious pluralism in a 2000 statement blasting a Hindu priest who was invited to give an opening prayer in Congress: "[W]hile it is true that the United States of America was founded on the sacred principle of religious freedom for all, that liberty was never intended to exalt other religions to the level that Christianity holds in our country's heritage.... Our Founders ... would have found utterly incredible the idea that all religions, including paganism, be treated with equal deference."
The FRC has one of the most anti-gay platforms of any major political organization, including expressions of support for the criminalization of homosexuality. Earlier this year, the group called on members to pray for the continuation of Malawi's law prohibiting homosexuality , under which a gay couple was sentenced to fourteen years in jail. Senior fellow Peter Sprigg said he would "much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them into the United States because we believe homosexuality is destructive to society."
Perkins himself frequently reflects the extreme views of his organization. He:
At last year's Values Voter Summit, Perkins managed to simultaneously insult U.S. servicemembers and several important U.S. allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying that armies that allow gays and lesbians to serve openly " participate in parades, they don't fight wars to keep the world free ."
Mat Staver
Mat Staver is the head of the Liberty University School of Law and its legal affiliate, Liberty Counsel, both sponsors of the Values Voter Summit. Liberty Counsel vehemently opposes rights for gays and lesbians, and in July filed the lawsuit to overturn New York's Marriage Equality Act . The group's Director of Cultural Affairs Matt Barber has called marriage equality " rebellion against God" and said LGBT youth are more likely to commit suicide because they know " what they are doing is unnatural, is wrong, [and] is immoral ." Barber has also described liberalism as "hatred for God" and said the president and Democrats "are anti-God." In fact, Liberty Counsel claimed that Obama is " pushing America to move under the curse " of God and " jeopardizing our nation" for purportedly not supporting Israel.
Through his role at Liberty Counsel and on his radio program Faith & Freedom, Staver has:
Staver aggressively promotes "ex-gay" reparative therapy and warns that gays and lesbians are " intent on trampling upon the fundamental freedoms " of others. He is also closely linked to the saga of Lisa Miller, a woman represented by Liberty Counsel who kidnapped her daughter and fled to Central America after a court granted custody to her former partner, a lesbian woman. Although Liberty Counsel denies involvement in the kidnapping, earlier this year Miller was reportedly staying at the house of Staver's administrative assistant's father in Nicaragua . Staver has also taught the Miller case in his law classes as an example of an instance where "God's law" preempts "man's law."
Jerry Boykin
Retired Army Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin sparked a controversy when, as a high-ranking official in the Bush Defense Department, he framed the War on Terror as a holy war against Islam. He has since built a career as a Religious Right speaker, specializing in anti-Muslim rhetoric and anti-Obama conspiracy theories. Boykin rejects religious freedom for American Muslims, claiming that Islam "is not just a religion, it is a totalitarian way of life." In an interview with Bryan Fischer, he called for "no mosques in America."
Boykin is a leading member of the dominionist group The Oak Initiative. In a speech at the group's conference in April, he declared that George Soros and the Council on Foreign Relations conspired to collapse the U.S. economy in order to help President Obama get elected. Last year, he told the group that President Obama was using his health care reform legislation as a cover to establish a private army of Brownshirts loyal just to him .
Star Parker
Parker is a long-time Religious Right activist who is particularly active in anti-gay and anti-abortion rights work. As Washington, DC was poised to legalize marriage equality, Parker warned that it would lead to more HIV infections in the city, which would " transform officially into Sodom." In a recent radio interview with Tony Perkins, Parker mused that black family life was " more healthy" under slavery than it is today and has accused liberals of treating Justice Clarence Thomas and Gov. Sarah Palin like runaway slaves. She has called legal abortion a "genocide" on par with slavery and the Holocaust.
Ed Vitagliano
As the AFA's research director, Ed Vitagliano helped co-produce the 2000 anti-gay documentary "It's Not Gay," which is riddled with misleading statistics about gays and lesbians and promotes "ex-gay" reparative therapy. The "documentary" starred ex-gay leader Michael Johnston, a self-described "former homosexual," who was later revealed to have been secretly having sex with other men. Vitagliano's anti-gay work has continued apace -- on the AFA's radio program this year, Vitagliano argued that gay men are " abusing the nature of the design of the human body" and said homosexuality is not a " natural and normal and healthy activity." Vitagliano also scolded congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis for supporting marriage equality , saying that Lewis "thumbed [his] nose" at God and "needs to go back and read his Bible."
Bishop Harry Jackson
Jackson, who built his career as an avowed opponent of rights for gays and lesbians, is a regular speaker at Religious Right conferences. He has called for a "SWAT Team" of "Holy Ghost terrorists" to work against hate crimes legislation that protects gays and lesbians, and said that black organizations that support gay rights have " sold out the black community" and have been " co-opted by the radical gay movement ." Jackson claims that gay marriage is part of " a Satanic plot to destroy our seed" and that the larger gay rights movement is " an insidious intrusion of the Devil."
Along with his fierce opposition to LGBT rights, Jackson has compared legal abortion to "lynching" and urged the Senate to defeat Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court because she is not a Protestant (Kagan is Jewish). Jackson has even described his political efforts in apocalyptic terms, telling a Religious Right group before the 2010 elections, "God is saying to us 'I want to pick a fight in which I can wipe out my enemies and cause them to be silenced once and for all.' This is where America is; if we do not recognize and repent, we are going to see our way of life destroyed as we now know it."
Lila Rose
Rose is the anti-choice activist responsible for carrying out a deceptive hit job against Planned Parenthood this year. Members of Rose's group, Live Action, went to Planned Parenthood clinics around the country posing as clients seeking help with a child sex trafficking ring. Planned Parenthood alerted the FBI about the activity, and the one staffer who handled the supposed traffickers inappropriately was promptly fired. Nevertheless, Rose claimed that her hoax proved "beyond a shadow of a doubt that Planned Parenthood intentionally breaks state and federal laws and covers up the abuse of young girls it claims to serve."
Rose is no newcomer to the Values Voter Summit: in a speech at 2009's summit, she called for abortions to be performed "in the public square."
Glenn Beck
Until Beck's Fox News program was canceled earlier this year, he was one of the Right's most visible fear-mongers and conspiracy theorists. When his violent rhetoric inspired some real threats against progressive leaders, he laughed off the critics who urged him to choose his words more responsibly. Beck's elaborate conspiracy theories include the idea that socialists and Islamists were planning a global caliphate, with the help of American progressives; an obsession with the progressive funder George Soros, at whom he leveled a number of anti-Semitic smears including a personal attack that the Anti-Defamation league called "horrific"; and a distrust of President Obama, who he once said was "racist" with a " deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture ."
On air, Beck joked about killing prominent progressives (for instance, poisoning Nancy Pelosi's wine), but frequently insisted that it is progressives who were urging violence, even predicting his own martyrdom. In one 2010 broadcast, he warned that "anarchists, Marxists, communists, revolutionaries, Maoists" have to "eliminate 10 percent of the U.S. population" in order to "gain control."
After a terrorist in Oslo killed dozens of young members of Norway's Labor Party at an island summer camp, Beck attacked the victims , comparing the camp to "Hitler Youth" and calling it "disturbing."
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