1/ Mitch McConnell and Trump met for lunch today after Steve Bannon called for a "season of war" against the Senate majority leader and the rest of the GOP establishment. Bannon compared McConnell to Julius Caesar and vowed to challenge any Senate Republican who doesnât publicly condemn attacks on Trump. âYeah, Mitch, the donors are not happy. Theyâve all left you. Weâve cut your oxygen off,â Bannon said. (Politico / The Guardian / CNN)
That was a few days ago. Is the Values Voter Summit a hate group or are they just anti-gay? I donât know enough about them to know and it seems only partisan media refers to them in strong terms.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated some of the organizations running the Values Voter Summit as hate groups based on analogous qualifiers used by the FBI.
SPLC has had some listings challenged in the past, but the identifying criteria they use seems reasonable. In disputed cases, quotes and official statements made by the offending groups often speak for themselves.
An organization whose primary purpose is to promote animosity, hostility, and malice against persons of or with a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity which differs from that of the members or the organization, e.g., the Ku Klux Klan, American Nazi Party.
In the least, several of the groups hold very extreme âtraditionalistâ views & push conspiracy theories that demonize or dehumanize entire demographics based on a single characteristic that violates âbiblical lawâ. These views arenât fringe nor only held by a few membersâtheyâre held by leadership as core ideology.
For example, their Presidents, VPs, Chairmen, Senior Fellows, etc. have stated & believe the entire religion of Islam is evil, shouldnât be protected by the 1st Amendment, and is a threat to democracy. Others have threatened physical violence against transgender people who use menâs or womenâs bathrooms. Some advocate for not just denying LGBTQ persons equality/rights, but also favor criminalizing âhomosexual behaviorâ or favor deporting them because âhomosexuality is destructive to societyâ.
One of the groupsâ Presidents, Tony Perkins, has called pedophilia a âhomosexual problemâ and falsely asserts gay men are more likely to molest children.
The summit also distributed a flyer advertising a book called The Health Hazards of Homosexuality, which promotes homophobia by spinning or distorting public health info.
[The book] also claims homosexuality is a mental disorder and the truth is being suppressed by âthe homosexual lobby and their allies,â including the âradicalizedâ entertainment industry, press and educational establishments.
Semantics matter, but personally I think theyâve extended beyond simple anti-gay sentiments of âI donât like gay sexâ and ratcheted up the animosity to âwe should jail or remove these people from our communitiesâ.
Thanks, John for the extra info! Iâm even more surprised that it hasnât made it into the news, but I suppose there is so much more going on that things like this, while still so shocking, still donât make the daily Terrible Top 10 Trump stories for news outlets.
Ah, of course, I should have said I was surprised I didnât see it in Fridayâs. I was hoping that with your skills you had found something more about the event than in the partisan media, but even if they are just anti-gay and not technically a âhate groupâ it is still very depressing to me.