Saturday saw ten, count 'em ten, Republican candidates try to woo voters at the Ames, Iowa Family Leadership Summit. Because it is a conservative event with "Family" in the title, it was of course
a hotbed of anti-LGBT lunacy.
Between candidates, conservative leaders invoked religion and spoke about the need for the next president to support socially conservative ideologies.
Brian Brown, president of anti-same sex marriage group National Organization for Marriage, condemned the Supreme Court’s decision and said the fight must continue.
“Did Frederick Douglass give up when he was fighting against slavery?” Brown asked the audience.
Asserting that same-sex marriage in America is the moral equivalent to chattel slavery is indeed top-notch frothing delusion. I'll give Brown a begrudging pumpkin sticker, however, for his apparent confidence that his doughy white audience of ultraconservative Iowans would know who Frederick Douglass was.
The other big news of the conference was that Scott Walker proclaimed himself firmly for a constitutional amendment to strip the Supreme Court's marriage equality ruling and return the question to individual states, but later fessed up to CNN reporter Dana Bash that he was unsure whether being gay was a "choice." Because being a conservative means demanding very strong laws against things that you freely admit you know nothing about.