Family Research Council

Tomorrow, the Family Research Council and its Arkansas affiliate will join with Rick Scarborough’s Vision America to hold an anti-marriage-equality rally in Little Rock.

Among the speakers at the rally — which follows the state supreme court’s decision to take up a marriage case — will be Arkansas native Josh Duggar, the TLC reality show star and the executive director of FRC’s political arm.

• Mr. Joshua Duggar – Executive Director of FRC Action
• Mr. Jerry Cox – Founder and President of Family Council
• Senator Bart Hester – Arkansas State Senate
• Representative Bob Ballinger – Arkansas House of Representatives
• Pastor Happy Caldwell – Founder and President of Victory Television Network
• Pastor Derick Easter – New St. Hurricane Missionary Baptist Church

The Arkansas Family Council urges members to turn out in Little Rock:

Are you ready to make your voice heard to the Arkansas Supreme Court about the sanctity of marriage?

Are you tired of judges running roughshod over the will of Arkansas’ voters?

If you are, then I want to invite you to an important rally on the Capitol Steps in Little Rock one week from today.

On Wednesday, November 19, at 11:00 AM Arkansans will rally in support of traditional marriage. This is an opportunity for everyone—especially ministers—to make their voices heard in saying marriage in Arkansas should remain the union of one man and one woman.

On Election Day, voters in Oregon, Alaska and Washington, D.C., voted to liberalize their marijuana laws, decriminalizing the possession or sale of the substance. But while Oregon and Alaska will be able to go ahead and start implementing their laws, D.C.’s more modest measure will first have to make it through a Republican Congress.

Once D.C.’s city council submits the measure to Congress, Congress will have 30 days to review it and during that time can pass a measure overriding it. Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland has vowed to use all of his political power to stop D.C.’s decriminalization measure from moving forward, including passing a spending bill rider barring the District from implementing its own law.

While D.C. will now be contending with Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, it’s not clear how much support the GOP congressmen trying to stop the law will get from their colleagues. Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, for instance, has said that overriding D.C.’s law would violate the GOP’s “fundamental principles,” including “limited government” and “states’ rights.”

But other conservatives have no such compunction. In an email to members of his organization on Friday, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins backed Harris’ effort to stop D.C. from implementing its decriminalization law by arguing that with a spending bill coming up, Harris “might finally have a way” to give the self-governed city with a population bigger than Vermont and Wyoming “the oversight it desperately needs” from congressional Republicans.

People in D.C. are still on a high after Election Day -- but a handful of congressmen are hoping that high isn’t permanent. As part of the District’s ballot, voters gave the thumbs up to a marijuana proposal that just made the lame-duck session a little more interesting. Under Initiative 71, locals would have the right to both possess pot (two ounces) and grow it at home.

Oregon and Alaska passed similar policies last Tuesday, but unlike the states’, D.C.’s measure is subject to Congress’s approval. And plenty of conservatives aren’t likely to give it. Before the District even planted the policy on last week’s ballot, Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) was trying to put the brakes on the push from D.C. Now, with a major funding bill on the docket, Congressman Harris might finally have a way to give the city the oversight it desperately needs.

In an interview with Rick Santorum on Tuesday, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins claimed that American Christians are being persecuted because the U.S. “began to normalize behavior that had long been considered inappropriate” and that such supposed persecution in the U.S. is contributing to violent religious persecution around the globe.

“You hate to use the term persecution, because when you look around the world, we see real religious persecution,” Santorum, who was guest hosting Steve Deace’s show, said. “We see people dying, churches being burned, we see mass killings of Christians, so I sort of tread lightly on the world persecution.”

But, he added, “this is really the first time in this country where we’ve seen any kind of coordinated effort of government really imposing its will on the American public and forcing them to comply or else.”

Perkins told Santorum that he need not use caution in referring to things like nondiscrimination ordinances in the U.S. as “persecution,” telling him “there is a correlation…between the increase in persecution abroad and the increase of intolerance from our own government here at home.”

“They feel like if it’s not a priority for us to have religious freedom here at home, then certainly it’s not going to be a priority for us to speak out for the persecuted peoples abroad,” he said.

Perkins routinely attacks the Obama administration for “doing nothing” to stop the persecution of Christians abroad, even in cases when the administration is demonstrably doing things to combat such persecution.

Earlier in the program, the two gave a clearer idea of what they mean by the “persecution” of Christians in America, discussing the situation in Houston where a number of pastors received subpoenas as part of a lawsuit filed by anti-gay activists trying to take down the city’s nondiscrimination ordinance.

Perkins commended Santorum for warning America that “this was coming if we began to normalize behavior that had long been considered inappropriate and began to protect it and provide preferential treatment to it.”

Rep. Doug Lamborn claimed yesterday that the Obama administration is overlooking religious persecution abroad because it is too busy defending LGBT rights.

In an interview on the Family Research Council’s “Washington Watch” program, the Colorado Republican told FRC President Tony Perkins that the Obama administration is “really more motivated and active promoting things like lesbian and gay rights, transgendered [sic] rights and those kind of issues” than in preventing religious persecution.

“We have the sad situation of persecuted religious minorities in the Middle East and other parts of the country, including Christians and other various sects out there, that are being really persecuted, sometimes they’re being beheaded or crucified or tortured because of their religious views,” he said. “So the State Department,y ou would think, would want to be all over that, would want to be pressing for countries to be respecting the rights of religious minorities.

“But it seems like they are really more motivated and active promoting things like lesbian and gay rights, transgendered [sic] rights and those kind of issues to the neglect of religious prosecution [sic]. And I just want them to pay attention to the severe and deadly prosecution [sic] of Christians and other religious people wherever that occurs in the world.”

Perkins agreed, saying that “Christians are dying around the world and they’re doing nothing.”

The claim that the Obama administration is “doing nothing” to combat the persecution of religious minorities around the world is a frequent refrain among Religious Right commentators — and it’s completely deceptive.

In fact, when President Obama announced airstrikes in Iraq this summer, he cited ISIS’s violence against Yazidis, Christians and other Muslims as a reason for the intervention. Obama and National Security Advisor Susan Rice recently met with Mideast Christian leaders, one of whom said he “felt how deeply moved he was by what was happening to the Christians there.” Administration officials have repeatedly denounced anti-Semitic and anti-Christian attitudes in the Mideast, and the State Department operates its own Office of International Religious Freedom.

Even when the Obama administration has helped to free Christians imprisoned because of their faith, Perkins and his fellow Religious Right activists have ignored the administration’s efforts. Perkins actually criticized the Obama administration after it helped free Kenneth Bae, a U.S. missionary jailed in North Korea, and he tried to use the imprisonment of Meriam Ibrahim — a Sudanese Christian who was freed with the help of U.S. diplomats —to attack Obama’s support for gay rights and attempt to overturn Citizens United.

Meanwhile, while Perkins has been falsely claiming that the Obama administration is ignoring the persecution of Christians, he has been actively opposing State Department efforts to protect LGBT people from oppressive laws and state-sanctioned violence abroad. Perkins has praised Uganda’s draconian anti-LGBT law and warned that Obama’s “radical sexualism” is promoting “global homosexuality.”

The Religious Right has for the past two years joined with human rights groups in lifting up the case of Kenneth Bae, an American Christian missionary who was imprisoned in a North Korean work camp on charges of trying to overthrow the government.

Bae was released this weekend after the Obama administration sent national intelligence director James Clapper on a secret mission to retrieve him and a fellow American prisoner, Matthew Todd Miller. Upon his return to the United States, Bae thanked President Obama and the State Department for “working tirelessly” to secure his release.

You might expect that a group like the Family Research Council that has been championing Bae’s case would take a break from partisan bickering to celebrate the good news of Bae's freedom. But you would be wrong!

In his daily email yesterday, FRC’s president, Tony Perkins, reacted to Bae’s release by accusing the Obama administration of not caring enough about Christian political prisoners — like, for instance, Bae. Perkins wrote that the administration’s work to free Bae was “surprising” and went on to attack the president for his “absolute silence” on the imprisonment of American pastor Saeed Abedini in Iran:

Although the suffering left deep scars, Bae insists that he is “recovering.” He and Miller, who the communist government sentenced to hard labor for participating in what they called a “Christian conspiracy,” thanked the Obama administration for sending a “brief message” through his intelligence officials asking for Bae and Miller’s release. For the President, it was a surprising move given his absolute silence on Pastor Saeed Abedini, another American who languishes in a torturous existence at the hands of a ruthless Iranian government.

Meanwhile, here at home, his family’s pleas to the White House continue to fall on deaf ears. As we cheer Kenneth and Matthew’s release, our earnest prayers continue to lift up the millions of people -- like Pastor Abedini -- who are shackled for the true freedom of Jesus Christ.

In fact, Secretary of State John Kerry has repeatedly urged Iran to release Abedini and President Obama personally pressed for Abedini’s release in a phone call with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani last year.

In an interview with Ohio Religious Right activist Molly Smith last week, Family Research Council Senior Fellow Bob Morrison compared the LGBT rights movement to the Vietnam draft, lamenting that “the whole country’s being conscripted into a pride parade.”

“Now we’re finding out that it’s not just about defending marriage, as important as that is,” Morrison told Smith. “It’s a question of defending liberty itself, because they can’t violate the laws of nature and of nature’s God, as the Declaration talks about, they can’t violate those laws without trampling religious freedom and political liberty at the same time.”

Speaking of nondiscrimination laws that prevent businesses from discriminating against LGBT people, he argued, “They’re not exercising discrimination, what they’re doing, what you’re doing is conscripting them. You’re forcing them to take part in your gay pride parade.”

“When I was a young guy, the draft was a hot issue,” he added. “Okay, well we’re being conscripted, the whole country’s being conscripted into a pride parade, and I don’t want to be in that parade.”

On yesterday’s edition of “Washington Watch,” Tony Perkins returned to one of his favorite talking points about how gay rights are part of a population control conspiracy to extinguish the human race.

A listener called in to tell the Family Research Council president that he thinks the reason homosexuality is “promoted is because it doesn’t lead to reproduction and that’s why it’s promoted. There’s this anti-life agenda, there’s a total anti-human, anti-life, human beings are a virus, type of mentality.”

Perkins responded that the caller was “absolutely correct,” saying that he once wrote about how “climate change alarmists and those who are pushing population control” actually “promote homosexuality” because “there’s no procreation there.”

“They go crazy, they deny it but the evidence is there, it’s footnoted in my book.”

If Family Research Council President Tony Perkins is really convinced that anti-gay activists like himself will prevail in their fight against marriage equality, he may want to reconsider linking the cause to efforts to preserve prohibitions on the sale of alcoholic beverages.

During yesterday’s broadcast of Perkins’ radio show “Washington Watch,” a caller from Arkansas asked if he would discuss the upcoming vote in the state on a ballot issue which would do away with “dry” county laws.

Perkins told the caller that the Arkansas challenge to bans on alcohol sales was part of a larger left-wing plot against culturally conservative values, mentioning recent gay marriage victories as another source of liberal interference.

“A lot of things are best decided at the local level and it’s the same thing that we’re seeing with marriage where the states have taken these positions and now you’ve got these courts coming in, undermining the states, you’ve got the Obama administration trying to redefine [marriage],” Perkins lamented. “It’s an all-out attack on values.”

On yesterday’s edition of “Washington Watch,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins lamented that same-sex marriage “is being forced upon the American people,” insisting that a majority of Americans will never support marriage equality.

Perkins said that just as reproductive rights debates are still contentious because legal abortion “runs contrary to nature,” gay marriage will similarly never be “resolved” until it is banned throughout the nation.

“I don’t care what they do, how oppressive government becomes in order to force this agenda through, they will never force Americans to accept this, the majority of Americans to accept it. Won’t happen,” he said. “Some may go silent, some may be carried away but they will not resolve this issue, trust me.”

Later in the show, Perkins reiterated his support for impeaching President Obama: “If something’s wrong, it’s wrong. Whether or not you can get the conviction that you desire, it’s still wrong and the House has the responsibility and the ability to charge him for this and I think it puts him on notice.”

“This president has systematically seen himself as above the law and I think this has done irreparable damage to the republic and to our form of government,” Perkins said. “Every time we stretch the limits, some of the elasticity goes out. It’s like those gym shorts, when you stretch them out they don’t always go back and I’m afraid that’s what this president is doing, he’s gone and stretched those gym shorts.”