The anti-gay hate group Family Research Council (FRC) brought quite a collection of extremists to Washington, D.C., for its Values Voter Summit 2011 (VVS). According to the FRC, the event, which is being held today and tomorrow at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, has an attendance of some 3,000. It’s co-sponsored by organizations, like the American Family Association (AFA), that join the FRC in demonizing of the LGBT community. (The Southern Poverty Law Center today ran an advertisement in the Washington Post detailing these groups’ false claims about LGBT people). But bigotry toward gays and lesbians is not the only kind on display here today. Muslims took quite a beating, too. ( continue to full post… )

Starting today, a number of prominent public figures will be attending and speaking at the Values Voter Summit, an annual gathering of socially conservative activists in Washington. But just what kind of values are they promoting?

The summit is hosted by the Family Research Council (FRC) and co-hosted by the American Family Association (AFA) –groups that regularly spew vicious lies about the LGBT community. ( continue to full post… )

Professor Jonathan Zimmerman is the latest historian to publicly refute the claim that gay men were largely responsible for the Nazi Party and the Holocaust. Zimmerman is chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Professions at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

The gay Nazi claim derives from the 1995 book The Pink Swastika, by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams. (Lively’s routine defamation of the LGBT community led to his Abiding Truth Ministries being added to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate group list). In that book, the authors claim that “the Nazi party was entirely controlled by militaristic male homosexuals throughout its short history” and that those men largely orchestrated the Holocaust. Lively and Abrams also argue, in contravention of the historical record, that persecution of homosexuals by Nazi Germany is largely a myth. ( continue to full post… )

In a moment of disturbing irony, the death last week of the last known gay survivor of Hitler’s concentration camps coincided with a cultural event that highlighted the fragility of LGBT people’s foothold on civil rights in modern society.

Rudolf Brazda, who, according to the Los Angeles Times, spent three years in Buchenwald wearing prison garb marked with a pink triangle to indicate he was gay, died last Wednesday at 98.

On Saturday – just one day after the Times published Brazda’s obituary – Texas Gov. Rick Perry led a prayer rally sponsored by American Family Association, an anti-gay hate group whose most prominent public face last year said that gays were responsible for the Holocaust.

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After weeks of weathering criticism for associating with some of the most hateful anti-gay voices in America, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is postured for his national day of prayer and fasting tomorrow just as he was when he announced it – defiantly arm-in-arm with the vanguard of the anti-gay right.

Billed as “The Response: a call to prayer for a nation in crisis,” the Christian prayer rally has been attacked for its close association with the American Family Association (AFA), the Tupelo, Miss.-based group whose work involves “combating the homosexual agenda” through the promotion of “traditional moral values.” The AFA agreed to front the bill for the rally, which has since drawn widespread support from the anti-gay right. ( continue to full post… )

For more than a week now, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been under fire for his plans to lead a prayer rally in Houston later this summer that is sponsored by the American Family Association (AFA), a particularly virulent gay-bashing group. A petition is circulating demanding that Perry abandon the event. But its organizers are moving defiantly forward with a new and expanded cast of some of the most charismatic figures in the anti-gay circuit endorsing the governor’s prayer rally.

The event, which has been billed as “The Response,” boasts endorsements from a veritable Who’s Who of the anti-gay movement. Among them is Cindy Jacobs, the Generals International pastor who claims that catastrophic natural events are the product of God’s anger over the acceptance of homosexuality, most famously when she attributed the mass death of blackbirds in Arkansas to divine wrath. “What happens when a nation makes a decision that is against God’s principles? … Nature itself will begin to talk to us,” Jacobs said. ( continue to full post… )

UPDATE: The Response spokesman Eric Bearse said on June 13 on AFA’s American Family Radio that the main objective of the event AFA is holding with Gov. Perry is to show people that Christianity is the only way to be hopeful. Bearse, who once served as Perry’s director of communications, said on the radio program, “anyone who comes to this solemn assembly regardless of their faith tradition or background, will feel the love, grace, and warmth of Jesus Christ in that assembly hall, in that arena. And that’s what we want to convey, that there’s acceptance and that there’s love and that there’s hope if people will seek out the living Christ.”

After news spread last week that Texas Gov. Rick Perry is planning to hold a prayer rally in August funded and organized by the stridently anti-gay group, the American Family Association (AFA), the governor and his staff have worked feverishly to distance themselves from the group’s hateful views.

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In the wake of revelations that Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s planned Aug. 6 prayer gathering in Houston is being funded by the anti-gay hate group American Family Association (AFA), at least two governors have declined an invitation to attend.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal both announced they would not go to Perry’s “The Response: a call to prayer for a nation in crisis.” Their announcement came one day after Hatewatch reported the Tupelo, Miss.-based AFA, which is paying for the August event, is one of the nation’s most strident voices spreading malicious anti-LGBT propaganda. ( continue to full post… )

The American Family Association (AFA), a virulent anti-gay hate group based in Tupelo, Miss., has agreed to pay for a national day of prayer being organized later this summer in Houston by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a longstanding ally to prominent figures in the anti-gay movement.

Eric Bearse, a spokesman for the event billed as “The Response: a Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis,” on Sunday told Reuters that Perry contacted the AFA a month ago “to call Americans together for a time of prayer.” The rally will be held Aug. 6 at Reliant Stadium, which holds nearly 72,000 people.

Neither Bearse nor Perry’s press office answered email requests for comment. But in a written statement, the governor “urged fellow governors to issue similar proclamations encouraging their constituents to pray that day for unity and righteousness.” ( continue to full post… )

Bryan Fischer, arguably America’s champion of publicly peddled hate, spent last week trying to convince the foolish and the gullible that gays — statistically the group most likely to be targeted by hate-related violence — are, in fact, the leading perpetrators of hate crimes.

Oh, and they’re Nazis, too.

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