The Southern Poverty Law Center joined with several other civil rights groups to publish an open letter to Reince Priebus and the RNC asking that their members stop associating with hate groups.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and a coalition of civil rights groups today called on the head of the Republican National Committee (RNC) to urge party members to disassociate themselves from groups behind this week’s Values Voter Summit because of their relentless demonization of the LGBT community.
The letter was triggered by the expected participation of many extreme Republicans at the Values Voter Summit going on this week, which is sponsored by several groups that SPLC has identified as hate groups because of their openly anti-LGBT rhetoric.
The summit is hosted by the Family Research Council (FRC) and co-sponsored by the American Family Association (AFA) and the Liberty Counsel. “These groups,” the open letter says, “engage in groundless demonization of LGBT people – portraying them as sick, vile, incestuous, violent, perverted, and a danger to the nation.”
The letter calls out numerous examples of hate speech by the summit organizers.
• FRC President Tony Perkins has repeatedly claimed that pedophilia is a “homosexual problem.” He has called the “It Gets Better” campaign – designed to give LGBT students hope for a better tomorrow – “disgusting” and a “concerted effort” to “recruit” children into the gay “lifestyle.”
• Bryan Fischer of the AFA has said, “Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.”
• Mat Staver of the Liberty Counsel has compared those who do not denounce same-sex marriage to those who remained silent during the Holocaust. Marriage equality, he has said, is the “beginning of the end of Western civilization.”
Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Bobby Jindal are on the speakers list at VVS.
The SPLC letter was published on September 24 in the The Washington Post and The Hill. Other co-signers of the letter include Faithful America, GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., and People for the American Way.
So, we can now expect the Rethugs to finally wake up to reality in America, and issue an apology to all LGBT Americans for their past reprehensible behavior, and pledge to respect the rights of all Americans regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation, both now and forevermore.
Or not.