When it rains, it pours. This has been a bad week for ALEC, and it's about to get worse. Yesterday, the Guardian leaked an internal memo showing that the group has been, at best, misrepresenting practices on their part which conflict with state and federal law. Today, a ton more stuff has come out. But.... my personal favorite a 1985 memo filled with the worst sort of hate that you can imagine. Starting with this line:
Whatever the type of homosexual, one of the more dominant practices in the homosexual world is pedophilia, the fetish for young children.
Other highlights:
ALEC classified all gay people into six categories: “the blatant, the secret lifer, the desperate, the adjusted, the bisexual and the situational.” The “blatant” gay person was "obvious and ‘limp-wristed’”; the “adjusted” would “try to conduct a ‘conventional’ gay marriage”; and so on. Yet no matter what category a gay person fell into, ALEC argued, the most dominant practice within “the homosexual world is pedophilia, the fetish for young children.” This tendency, the group claimed, was the product of the fact that “the homosexual cannot reproduce themselves biologically, so they must recruit the young.”
.......
When lawmakers led efforts against gay rights legislation, ALEC celebrated their acts in newsletters. For vetoing a gay rights bill, California Governor George Deukmejian was deemed “a political leader with courage.” Likewise, the group lauded ALEC State Senator H.L. Richardson for claiming the bill “would take away the liberty of an employer to refuse to hire homosexuals, even if the employer strongly believes that homosexuality is an abomination.”
The full memo in question is
available here.
Prepare to be outraged.
Better yet, contact ALEC politicans and ask why they are part of a group publishing hate speech.
Or write in to corporations that fund ALEC.
Or, if you're in Washington, go to the protest at their States and Nation meeting.