At no point during this long Politico article about Family Research Council head Tony Perkins does Politico mention that the Family Research Council is an SPLC-designated hate group. This is an odd omission, when giving the man a large number of paragraphs to declare that "evangelicals" are just fine with Trump having an affair with a porn actress while his wife was home with his four-month-old child, his subsequent payment of hush money, and every other glibly malevolent thing Donald Trump has done in his life.
Or it would have been. But the omission of Perkin's notorious credentials is done in service of asserting that hate group leader Perkins is a prime spokesman for the "evangelical" movement, which according to Tony Perkins is a Talibanesque cult willing to excuse and support moral depravity among their leaders in exchange for governmental power, and in that declaration Tony Perkins in fact mirrors the declarations of evangelical leaders perfectly.
“We kind of gave him—‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here,’” Perkins told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast.
Weigh a paid-off porn star against being the first president to address the March for Life, and a lot of evangelical leaders insist they can still walk away happy.
The hate group leader elevated by Politico into national evangelical spokesman may not be wrong, in his assessment; the evangelical movement may indeed, at this point, be itself a hate movement, in which case propping Perkins up as an overall leader makes as much sense as any. Perkins is joined in his assessment that Trump's grotesque anti-Christian behavior is of no consequence compared to his ability to serve as the movement's puppet by numerous faux-Christian "evangelical" leaders, including Franklin Graham, who has long teetered on the edge of hate-group leader himself as he forgives Trump’s every sin in exchange for a laundry list of federal punishments Graham would like to see done to his enemies. The list of evangelical leaders willing to openly defend Trump's amoral repulsiveness on television is long; the number of evangelical leaders of similar stature pushing back to defend the movement as something more than spittle-flecked grift barely amounts to a trickle.
True evangelical leaders, for example, ought to be in a fury that a hate group leader is widely considered the public face of their movement; that Tony Perkins, of all people, is the frequent White House visitor thought by Republicans and the press to best represent them. Their acquiescence is instructive.
Perkins cheers the White House’s restrictive posture toward abortion rights and its “religious freedom” executive orders (which critics allege are part of a thinly veiled attempt to legalize discrimination against LGBTQ Americans). He says his only gripe with the administration is that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is not doing enough to stop abortions and liberal activism around the world. “We’re seeing Soros dollars being connected with USAID funds, and they’re creating these pro-abortion, pro-communist groups in some cases, working to take down conservative governments,” Perkins says.
Are these pronouncements by anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim abortion-obsessed hate leader measurably different from other “evangelical” leaders? They are not. We may be best off presuming that "evangelical" voters, last seen defending child molestation by an Alabama Senate candidate under the precise same rationalization that Perkins used to defend Trump repeatedly soliciting sex from porn stars, themselves represent an emergent theocratic, anti-Christian, anti-American hate group. The evidence for this consists of their own words; the evidence against it consists of people like Perkins and Graham getting indignant when you suppose it, then immediately doubling down on their own insistence that deep depravity by movement leaders is indeed unimportant so long as their movement edges closer to formalizing anti-abortion laws, anti-Muslim laws, and anti-LGBTQ laws that federalize their own fringe religious beliefs and encode them by force of law upon all other Americans.
Evangelicalism is, according to its own most prominent leaders, a movement that seeks to disenfranchise and, if necessary, imprison those whose beliefs on abortion or homosexuality are different from their own; an argument that such a group is not, in fact, a hate group would seem to have an uphill climb. The blithe assertion that politicians in good standing with the religion can molest children or solicit porn star sex so long as they provide the faithful with their reliable votes puts the movement in direct camaraderie with malignant theocratic "revolutionaries" from Boko Haram to ISIS. And no, I do not feel the slightest compunction to hedge on that one; Mr. Graham can prove me wrong anytime he so desires, and will not. The Alabama preachers who defended Roy Moore's molestations with public assertions that the Bible encourages child brides remain unrepentant, and are still seething and bitter that their pliable ever-religious child molester did not win; I present them as my evidence of direct theocratic link between the various groups.
The public association of Perkins and a host of seedy televangelist grifters who have attached themselves, remora-like, to the most publicly and proudly immoral president of modern times is not enough to condemn an entire American religious sect as faux-Christian. But the cock has crowed a great many times, this last year, and those same voters have each time continued to back the notion that their leaders should be allowed to be corrupt, greedy, sinful, depraved, contemptuous, perverted, and whatever else they might wish so long as they are willing to wave a Bible around and promise the movement that "the gays" or the abortion-seekers will be punished.
At some point the rest of us need to stop pretending at a moral uprising among evangelicals that will never happen. It is barely even a religion at this point, rather than political sect; even the movement’s long-held obsession with too-evolved sexual mores got dropkicked to the sidelines the moment their own candidates were exposed to be perverts. The movement has not been subtle in announcing either their motivations or how few pretenses at morality they expect from their leaders in return; they seek a theocracy in which their enemies are governed by the movement's own loudest perverts and charlatans, and will abide any perverts and charlatans necessary to allow that to happen. The movement could disown Perkins, or Moore, or the jet-setting prosperity peddlers, or the indulgence-dispensing moral relativist Graham, or the transparently crooked man using the White House as a cash cow for his cheap real estate empire while making a mockery of every supposed religious tenet the group has had for the past forty years. It will not. Of course it will not. We will see preachers defending the forceful taking of child brides and the nobility of porn star sex before we see an evangelical movement truly and angrily denouncing those things.
It is not even a religion at this point; a religion has identifiable values. It is a hate group led by Tony Perkins, Franklin Graham, and a handful of grifting televangelists leeching off elderly Americans in order to buy themselves jewelry, property and jets. Now that the movement has descended into support for porn star sex and child brides we can dispense with the notion that it stands for anything at all. That cock has crowed; the rest of us need not claim camaraderie with these sorry shouting fakers. They are the crowd that will proudly march us into corruption and fascism; they will gladly wear the armbands of anyone who promises them a small sliver of power.