[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]
