This weekend, Tony Perkins and his gay-bashing Family Research Council (FRC) are hosting the annual Values Voter Summit, a Washington, D.C., gathering of right-wing religious activists that typically attracts a number of high-ranking, conservative public officials.

Among those scheduled to speak this year are House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer.

They and other public officials will be rubbing shoulders with a host of virulently anti-LGBT activists. The SPLC and a coalition of human rights groups has urged these public officials not to speak at the summit because their appearance legitimizes the lies and demonizing propaganda spread by groups like the FRC and the American Family Association, a co-sponsor. ( continue to full post… )

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and a coalition of human rights groups have written to several public figures, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, asking them not to speak at this weekend’s Values Voter Summit in Washington. The event is hosted by the Family Research Council (FRC), which the SPLC lists as a hate group for its dissemination of false and demonizing propaganda about the LGBT community.

The FRC has engaged in repeated, groundless demonization – portraying LGBT people as sick, vile, incestuous, violent, perverted, and a danger to the nation, the letter says. One of its officials has gone so far as to say homosexuality should be criminalized. Perhaps the FRC’s ugliest lie is its claim that gay men molest children at a far higher rate than heterosexual men – that pedophilia “is a homosexual problem,” in the words of Tony Perkins, the FRC president. ( continue to full post… )

Leave it to extreme elements of the anti-LGBT right to make Fox News look almost “fair and balanced” after all.

Frequently the target of left-leaning criticism, the cable news network and its most popular host, Bill O’Reilly, are now coming under fire for “helping violent homosexuals to kill Christians.”

Last week, a group of anti-gay activists leveled that charge as part of a campaign aimed at stopping O’Reilly from inviting LGBT rights advocate Wayne Besen onto his primetime program. ( continue to full post… )

Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association (AFA) spokesman whose ultraconservative worldview is so extreme that he makes Pat Buchanan look like Rachel Maddow, seems never to have met a fact that he couldn’t improve upon.

He has declared that gays were responsible for the Holocaust and opined that American Indians lost their land to European settlers because they (the natives) weren’t Christian. He has claimed that states have the right to impose religious tests on elected officials and said that HIV is not linked to AIDS – a dangerous and utterly false theory that has led to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in South Africa and elsewhere. ( continue to full post… )

We used to think the $20 million-a-year American Family Association (AFA) acted as crazy as it does mainly because it allowed mostly free rein to its best-known spokesman, the truly nutty Bryan Fischer. Fischer, after all, spends his days raving about how gay people were behind the Holocaust, how black people on welfare “rut like animals,” how the cure for promiscuity is to kill the promiscuous, even the idea, completely contradicted by science, that the HIV virus doesn’t cause AIDS.

Sure, there was wacky old Don Wildmon, who founded the Tupelo, Miss.-based group back in 1977 and was given to an occasional anti-Semitic diatribe about how Jews control the media and hate Christians. But that was mostly forgotten years ago, and Wildmon and his son generally sound a little calmer these days.

But the extremist bench at the AFA turns out to be deeper than that. ( continue to full post… )

U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said last night’s shooting in a Colorado movie theater is linked to “attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs,” the Huffington Post reports.

Speaking this morning with radio host Ernest Istook, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and former Colorado congressman, Gohmert said, “You know what really gets me, a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and then some senseless crazy act of terror like this.”

At least 59 people were injured and 12 killed when a gunman opened fire in a movie theater packed with fans attending the premiere of the new Batman movie last night in Aurora, Colo. ( continue to full post… )

Scott Lively, the anti-gay activist behind Abiding Truth Ministries, has been engaged in a decades-long, international campaign to demonize the LGBT community. He has lobbied on behalf of a law in Uganda to make homosexuality punishable by death and has worked hard to propagate the myth that gay men caused the Holocaust.

Now, he’s turning his attention to Springfield, Mo., where he has labeled a proposed expansion of the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance a “Gay Fascism bill.”

If passed, the new law will add protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity to the city’s standing law. According to local news reports, the Springfield City Council is scheduled to rule on it in August. ( continue to full post… )

A small Kentucky church that just a week earlier banned interracial couples from joining or participating in worship services reversed its policy Sunday in the wake of an avalanche of publicity that spread throughout the U.S. and to locales as far away as Canada, Europe, India and Africa.

The original bigoted policy was introduced by Melvin Thompson, former pastor of the Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church. Thompson, who is still a member of the church, refused to speak with Hatewatch. ( continue to full post… )

The Bible commands us to love our neighbors, but members of a Kentucky evangelical church have set strict limits on that love: The Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church voted Sunday to bar interracial couples from becoming members or participating in worship services.

Not everyone at the church agrees, and it may not be the last word.  Stacy Stepp, pastor of the small church in Gulnare, Ky., is appealing the new policy at a regional conference of church leaders Saturday in Pikeville, Ky.  “I want them to investigate the matter and resolve it,” Pastor Stepp told Hatewatch, adding that nothing in the Bible says that interracial marriage is bad. ( continue to full post… )

Pastor Tom Vineyard of Windsor Hills Baptist Church in Oklahoma must be bummed. Though onlookers reportedly gave him standing ovation for his impassioned speech against adding sexual orientation to the protected classes named in Oklahoma City’s employment nondiscrimination policy, City Council members on Tuesday voted 7-2 in favor of the measure.

Making his case that adding explicit protection against discrimination would “bring down God’s judgment on [the] city,” Vineyard cited a New York City judge named John Martaugh, who allegedly said that over half the murders in large cities are committed by LGBT people. ( continue to full post… )