Anti-gay slogans on display at FRC’s press conference claiming they are not a “hate group”
One day after a Virginia man is alleged to have shot a security guard at the D.C. headquarters of the anti-gay Family Research Council, the organization’s president, Tony Perkins, held a press conference to blame the shooting on the Southern Poverty Law Center — the group that in 2010 named FRC a “hate group” based on the SPLC’s documentation of FRC’s efforts to “knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people” — declaring that the watchdog group had given the shooter a “license” to shoot.
Perkins claims that FRC was designated a “hate group” for its political stance against marriage equality, even though SPLC and others have long documented the organization’s stances and statements on homosexuality, including the consistent linking of gays to pedophilia. Metro Weekly captured the entire press conference on video. Despite some audio issues, what really stands out is, just over Perkins’s right shoulder, a man wearing a priest collar and a t-shirt for emblazon with www.tearsforchildren.org, along with quotes about Sodom & Gommorrah and stickers promoting the National Organization for Marriage.
On its website, Tears for Children — led by Maryland’s “Minister Leroy” — lists the Family Research Council as one of its partners, along with other anti-gay groups such as the American Family Association. From the website’s home page: “I weep because of sadness in the world. I can not look into the eyes of a child and tell them that they have a choice of being a heterosexual or homosexual. My heart weeps when I think about the wolves and snakes who seek to manipulate innocent minds to believe that sin should be celebrated. We must speak truth in spite of evil and wickedness.”
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