Equality California (EQCA) today released a video attacking Tony Perkins, head of the certified anti-gay hate group Family Research Council, for his ties to the KKK, and calls out Perkins’ lies about SB 48, California’s FAIR Education Act that ensures the LGBT community, minorities, and the disabled are fairly included in public school education lessons.
READ: What Kinder, Gentler Anti-Gay Religious Hate Looks Like (Video)
The EQCA video replays Perkins’ FRC video, noting often the “lies lies lies” Perkins tells.
There is a very strong movement under way to stop SB 48, which become effective in January. One group, Stop SB 48, has been very effective at organizing and regularly send out fundraising emails and “notes from the field.”
Last month, opponents of SB 48, the FAIR Education Act, were allowed to collect signatures as a first step to put a repeal referendum on the ballot. Like marriage equality in Maine, SB 48 could be repealed before ever going into effect.
Fortunately, EQCA has put together a strong coalition to protect SB 48, but its a very tight battle.
Vetern journalist Rex Wockner quotes Roland Palencia, new head of EQCA, saying, ”I think that one of the things that we’re going to take on is defining them (the opponents).”
“Who gets to paint whom?” he asked. “We want to start engaging the conversation about painting them in the corner about how dangerous these people are to the people of California, and really expose their agenda — how these campaigns are persecution. … We need to define them as the extremists that they are.”
Palencia said that despite the opponents’ rhetoric in the new campaign — and in the 2008 campaign to re-ban same-sex marriage in California — schoolchildren are not harmed by hearing about the existence of gay and lesbian people.
Indeed, it is people who want to ban gay issues from schools who “are a danger to children and families,” he said.
EQCA has suggested that inclusive teaching about LGBT history will reduce anti-gay bullying in schools.
In 2005 John Aravosis of Americablog wrote, “The Family Research Council’s executive director, Tony Perkins, reportedly paid former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke over $80,000 for his who’s-who-of-racist-America mailing list in 1996. This should be the death of the Family Research Council, one of the religious right’s lead organizations, and the end of Tony Perkins career.”
Sadly, Perkins and his clan are still around.
Additionally, Perkins, who, given his public views, and, subsequently, the views of the FRC on issues like evolution and climate change, is extremely anti-science, actually has the temerity to claim – falsely – that SB 48, the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act, will take precious time away from the teaching of science.
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One of the civil suits against the Anoka-Hennepin School District, (in Bachmann's congressional district), which school district has a "Don't say gay" policy, alleges that a student was stopped from continuing a classroom presentation because he said that homosexuals had been victims of the Nazis. The anti-scholarship attitude is seen also from hate speech leaders such as Linda Harvey, who recently said there isn't proof that gay people exist. It is dismaying that, although the United States has some of the world's leading universities, scholarly standards do not universally apply to the country's public schools, and malicious anti-gay bigots have success repressing scholarship.
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