[From the diaries by susanbhu.] The Christian Right has a long and shifty history with white supremacist groups in the U.S. Certainly many do not and never have embraced racism. Others play ball.
It turns out that Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council and the organizer of “Justice Sunday,” the Christian Right rally in Louisville last weekend, has a seamy history — that includes a secret deal with white supremacist leader, David Duke.
“Four years ago,” Max Blumenthal writes in the The Nation magazine online, “Perkins addressed the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), America’s premier white supremacist organization, the successor to the White Citizens Councils, which battled integration in the South. In 1996 Perkins paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,000 for his mailing list. At the time, Perkins was the campaign manager for a right-wing Republican candidate for the US Senate in Louisiana. The Federal Election Commission fined the campaign Perkins ran $3,000 for attempting to hide the money paid to Duke.”
In addition to the outrageous religious supremacism of Perkins and the others who claimed that Democrats and liberals are opposed to “people of faith” and anti-Christian for opposing some of president Bush’s more extreme judicial nominations, their hypocrisy runs deep.
Blumenthal continues, “As the emcee of Justice Sunday, Tony Perkins positioned himself beside a black preacher and a Catholic “civil rights” activist as he rattled off the phone numbers of senators wavering on President Bush’s judicial nominees. The evening’s speakers studiously couched their appeals on behalf of Bush’s stalled judges in the vocabulary of victimhood, accusing Democratic senators of ‘filibustering people of faith.'”
“James Dobson, who founded the Family Research Council as the Washington lobbying arm of his Focus on the Family, invoked the Christian right’s persecution complex. On an evening when Jews were celebrating the second night of Passover, Dobson claimed, “The biggest Holocaust in world history came out of the Supreme Court” with the Roe v. Wade decision.”
[Crossposted from FrederickClarkson.com]
Mr. Frist keeps
I’m not at all surprised, of course.
Is there any hint that this will be picked up by RWCM, perhaps by one of the few investigative journalists still working the angles?
-AG
PS: This is my first post on BMT! I’m amazed to find a forum with an even higher signal-to-noise ratio than dKos.
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This certainly doesn’t surprise me in the least. In fact I think I almost expected something like this. I don’t consider people like Dobson and Focus on the Family or any of that ilk to be religious in any way not matter how they try to portray themselves as such.
They are much more in a supremacist mold with their authoritative and rigid doctrines and fanatical and puritanical ideologies.
My hope of this hitting MSM is about nil but it sure would be nice to see Focus on the Family on the dam hot seat for a change. Instead of the way the media and talking heads giving them automatic(and unfounded) respect….how bout they do their jobs as real reporters and ask questions and follow up questions.
Terrorizing people of faith with the truth again!