Via press release and posted publicly to the Southern Poverty Law Center website. From SPLC Senior Fellow Mark Potak: Yesterday’s attack on the Family Research Council and the shooting of a security guard there was a tragedy. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) deplores all violence, and our thoughts are with the wounded victim, Leo Johnson, his family and others who lived through the attack.Right on, SPLC!
For more than 40 years, the SPLC has battled against political extremism and political violence. We have argued consistently that violence is no answer to problems in a democratic society, and we have strongly criticized all those who endorse such violence, whether on the political left or the political right.
But this afternoon, FRC President Tony Perkins attacked the SPLC, saying it had encouraged and enabled the attack by labeling the FRC a “hate group.” The attacker, Floyd Corkins, “was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Perkins said. “I believe the Southern Poverty Law Center should be held accountable for their reckless use of terminology.”
Perkins’ accusation is outrageous. The SPLC has listed the FRC as a hate group since 2010 because it has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people — not, as some claim, because it opposes same-sex marriage. The FRC and its allies on the religious right are saying, in effect, that offering legitimate and fact-based criticism in a democratic society is tantamount to suggesting that the objects of criticism should be the targets of criminal violence.
As the SPLC made clear at the time and in hundreds of subsequent statements and press interviews, we criticize the FRC for claiming, in Perkins’ words, that pedophilia is “a homosexual problem” — an utter falsehood, as every relevant scientific authority has stated. An FRC official has said he wanted to “export homosexuals from the United States.” The same official advocated the criminalizing of homosexuality.
Perkins and his allies, seeing an opportunity to score points, are using the attack on their offices to pose a false equivalency between the SPLC’s criticisms of the FRC and the FRC’s criticisms of LGBT people. The FRC routinely pushes out demonizing claims that gay people are child molesters and worse — claims that are provably false. It should stop the demonization and affirm the dignity of all people.
Failing
to mention that he himself founded a white supremacist group, former
Youth For Western Civilization president Kevin DeAnna has authored a World Net Daily article in support of the Family Research Council. In a press conference in front of the council’s Washington headquarters, Perkins thanked political opponents who expressed their condolences after the attack by a man who had been volunteering at an LGBT center. But the FRC chief challenged them “to go a step further.” He also asked organizations that condemned the violence to “call for an end to the reckless rhetoric that I believe” led to the shooting. Perkins identified the Southern Poverty Law Center as responsible for the atmosphere, stating that it gave suspected gunman Floyd Lee Corkins “a license to shoot.” When challenged by reporters, Perkins expanded on his remarks and claimed that the SPLC’s designation of the Family Research Council as a “certified hate group … marginalizes individuals and organizations letting people feel free to go and do bodily harm to innocent people who are simply working and representing folks from all across this country.”Last year a representative for Youth For Western Civilization joined a march of German nationalists and neo-Nazis.
Also represented was a small but growing nonprofit U.S. organization called Youth for Western Civilization. The group, which bills itself as "America's right-wing youth movement," bannered a photo of the Cologne rally on its website this week, accompanying an account that declared that "we will not falter nor fail in our attempt for the defense of the Western homeland." Youth for Western Civilization, which has chapters at only about 10 U.S. campuses, is just one of hundreds of conservative student organizations around the nation, far smaller than better-known college-based groups like Young Americans for Freedom and College Republicans. But its influence is bigger than its size, drawing the attention of large numbers of admirers — and critics — since it began organizing three years ago. Thanks to its discipline in advocating a small number of simply stated positions and a new-media-savvy communications strategy, YWC may be radically refreshing the template for political organizing in American higher education.The Family Research Council and neo-Nazis are birds of a feather as Tony Perkins has twice spoken before a Louisiana white supremacy group that lists an end to "race mixing" among its "statement of principles."
As
we inhabit our body with increasing sensitivity, we learn its unspoken
language and patterns, which gives us tremendous freedom to make
choices. The practice of cutting thoughts and dispersing negative
repetitive patterns can be simplified by attending to the patterns in
the body first, before they begin to be spun around in the mind.
|
Via press release and posted publicly to the Southern Poverty Law Center website. From SPLC Senior Fellow Mark Potak: Yesterday’s attack on the Family Research Council and the shooting of a security guard there was a tragedy. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) deplores all violence, and our thoughts are with the wounded victim, Leo Johnson, his family and others who lived through the attack.Right on, SPLC!
For more than 40 years, the SPLC has battled against political extremism and political violence. We have argued consistently that violence is no answer to problems in a democratic society, and we have strongly criticized all those who endorse such violence, whether on the political left or the political right.
But this afternoon, FRC President Tony Perkins attacked the SPLC, saying it had encouraged and enabled the attack by labeling the FRC a “hate group.” The attacker, Floyd Corkins, “was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Perkins said. “I believe the Southern Poverty Law Center should be held accountable for their reckless use of terminology.”
Perkins’ accusation is outrageous. The SPLC has listed the FRC as a hate group since 2010 because it has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people — not, as some claim, because it opposes same-sex marriage. The FRC and its allies on the religious right are saying, in effect, that offering legitimate and fact-based criticism in a democratic society is tantamount to suggesting that the objects of criticism should be the targets of criminal violence.
As the SPLC made clear at the time and in hundreds of subsequent statements and press interviews, we criticize the FRC for claiming, in Perkins’ words, that pedophilia is “a homosexual problem” — an utter falsehood, as every relevant scientific authority has stated. An FRC official has said he wanted to “export homosexuals from the United States.” The same official advocated the criminalizing of homosexuality.
Perkins and his allies, seeing an opportunity to score points, are using the attack on their offices to pose a false equivalency between the SPLC’s criticisms of the FRC and the FRC’s criticisms of LGBT people. The FRC routinely pushes out demonizing claims that gay people are child molesters and worse — claims that are provably false. It should stop the demonization and affirm the dignity of all people.
Chelsea Clinton says she's no longer totally against following in the footsteps of her parents."Before my mom's campaign I would have said no. Not because it was something I had thought a lot about but because people have been asking me that my whole life," Clinton, speaking of her mother's unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid, said in an interview for the September issue of Vogue. [snip] "If there were to be a point where it was something I felt called to do and I didn't think there was someone who was sufficiently committed to building a healthier, more just, more equitable, more productive world? Then that would be a question I'd have to ask and answer."In the Vogue interview, Chelsea credits her friendships with gay men as helping change her father's stance on same-sex marriage.
One night, over dinner at Cheddar’s, Chelsea mentions that a lot of her male friends are gay. “It was something that I wasn’t even aware of until Marc pointed it out,” she says. Observing the strength of those friendships—many of Chelsea’s friends spend every Thanksgiving with the Clintons at Chappaqua—was one of the key factors in changing Bill Clinton’s position on gay marriage. “Those conversations often start in families and then billow out into the community. Change is hard. And I was really proud of my dad.”
