Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council

I just received the following email from the Family Research Council:

They’re at it again.

This week news broke that a recent briefing to Army soldiers at Camp Shelby in Mississippi featured and endorsed dangerous and false left-wing anti-Christian propaganda. In this briefing, Fox News writer Todd Starnes reports that U.S. Army troops were explicitly led to believe that the American Family Association (AFA) — a Christian ministry — was a “hate group” which soldiers should avoid at all costs.

To make matters worse, in the presentation AFA was falsely associated with Rev. Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, a group that causes great pain to families of fallen soldiers. Phelps was pictured holding a sign with a vile slogan alongside information on AFA — a classic propaganda technique. The message was clear: A Christian group that many soldiers go to for inspiration, education, and encouragement was to be avoided by U.S. military personnel.

It would be bad enough if this were the first time, but it’s happened before. This latest incident follows a clear and emerging pattern of indoctrination which seems to parrot the talking points of the liberal, anti-Christian Southern Poverty Law Center — a group whose work has been connected in federal court with domestic terrorism. Earlier this year a similar incident was uncovered in which Catholics and evangelical Christians were demonized as extremists during a military training briefing that used SPLC’s talking points. The license given to the trainers of our military to use leftist propaganda to intimidate Christians must stop. Separating our troops from Christian organizations they support and draw encouragement from must end now.

FRC ends this email with a link to a petition which I have absolutely no interest in linking to. The group is referring to a claim by Fox News reporter Todd Starnes, a claim which I wrote about this morning.  I took it upon myself to figuratively eviscerate Starnes’ claim that the American Family Association is an innocent Christian group being “persecuted” by the Army.

Apparently there is still enough sharpness on my pen to turn my attention to FRC because as luck would have it, that organization is also considered to be a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Let’s be honest here. I don’t know the entire story regarding the incident because Starnes has a reputation of playing fast and loose with the truth. However, I do know that this  claim by FRC about the Army supposedly persecuting Christians is a lie.

And FRC defending any group from charges of being an anti-gay hate group is like a pack of rabid wolves defending another pack of rabid wolves from being called bloodthirsty.

In my post this morning, I took satisfactory aim at AFA by highlighting facts about the group that Starnes no doubt choose to omit.

Now Family Research Council, it’s your turn. This is FRC president Tony Perkins:

And this is FRC policy analyst Peter Sprigg expressing a desire to export gays out of America:

In addition, Perkins also:

Compares gay legal advocates to terrorists (at 0:31 mark): “[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.”

says “It doesn’t matter what society does, I think within the homosexual, most of them know that this behavior, it’s just not right, it’s not what we were created to do and it’s against God’s plan and it’s contrary to our nature and the way were were created.”

says “The truth is that we cannot redefine marriage without opening the door to all manner of moral and social evil.”

called the It Gets Better project “disgusting,” claiming it tells children “that it’s okay to be immoral” and constitutes a “concerted effort to persuade kids that homosexuality is okay and actually to recruit them into that lifestyle“; also called the project a “deceptive lie”

And let’s not leave Sprigg out. He has:

said he wants to see being gay punished by law: “I think that the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned the sodomy laws in this country, was wrongly decided. I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions against homosexual behavior.”

claims: “There is, for example, a single and simple solution for smoking-related illnesses, and we have all heard it—‘If you don’t smoke, don’t start. If you do smoke, quit.’  It’s long past time for public health authorities to say the same” (about being gay)

claims homosexuality is “harmful to the people who engage in it and to society at large“

To paraphrase the hackneyed question about “buying a used car,” I have to ask “would you trust any tale of anti-Christian persecution coming from any organization which employs these two guys?”