Expressing regret that campaign commitments prevented him from attending the Values Voter Summit personally, presidential candidate Mitt Romney thanked the Southern Poverty Law Center-identified hate group, Family Research Council, for their leadership, including a specific call-out to president Tony Perkins.
FRC President Tony Perkins
I'd like to thank Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council for their leadership.
Leadership like that time Perkins paid $82,500 to use the phone bank of former
Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke for an election run-off?
Leadership like explaining to his followers the true nature of all gay people?
“They are intolerant. They are hateful. They are vile. They are spiteful...pawns of the enemy.”
And who can forget Perkins' leadership on the issue of
LGBT teen suicide?
[They] “have a higher propensity to depression or suicide because of that internal conflict; homosexuals may recognize intuitively that their same-sex attractions are abnormal.”
Perkins has also
called the It Gets Better Project "disgusting."
Perkins' leadership includes comparing gay people to terrorists:
“[B]ack in the 80s and early 90s, I worked with the State Department in anti-terrorism and we trained about 50 different countries in defending against terrorism, and it’s, at its base, what terrorism is, it's a strike against the general populace simply to spread fear and intimidation so that they can disrupt and destabilize the system of government. That's what the homosexuals are doing here to the legal system.”
Romney also thanks Family Research Council for
"bringing all of us together."
Of course, "all of us," does not include LGBT people. Nor does it include women who'd like to make their own reproductive choices. Nor does it include Muslims, atheists or anyone who subscribes to a "whacky, fringe" spiritual belief, including liberal Christianity. (Some Jews are begrudgingly tolerated, so long as they promise to do their part and return to the promise land, enabling the Rapture™.) It also doesn't include liberals, or recent immigrants. Or anyone who loves, supports or has a shred of respect for anyone the aforementioned groups.
But you know, he basically means "all of us in Romney Wingnut land." And like every club Romney joins, it's very exclusive.