Hate and Conservatism
Dana Milbank wrote this week in the Washington Post that the Family Research Council is not a hate group, even though the Southern Poverty Law Center has concluded, after extensive and meticulous research, that they are. Milbank says the group is simply "a mainstream conservative think tank."
Required reading: John Aravosis' rebuttal on AmericaBlog explains exactly why FRC is a hate group. It is a long post with lots of quotes and links. Only those who are actually motivated -- LGBT people and straight allies, that is -- will read it, but you should follow his reasoning and his references.
OK, there is no doubt that FRC is a hate group. Milbank says "it’s absurd to put the group, as the law center does, in the same category as Aryan Nations, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Stormfront and the Westboro Baptist Church," but it is not absurd. The Family Research Council is just like those groups. Maybe slicker than some of them, but just the same.
But really, that doesn't matter right now, they are what they are. I am interested in the idea that hate has become a "mainstream conservative" value.
There used to be something scary called "conservatism." Barry Goldwater was the figurehead and the spokesman for the movement. Conservatives were brash, outspoken, belligerent, and opposed to mamby-pambyism of any sort. It was the far right of American politics, and reasonable people were alarmed. They tacitly supported segregation (aka "states' rights") and loudly supported war, with nuclear weapons if possible. Scary, dangerous people with wild, un-American, totalitarian ideas.
By 1998, even Goldwater and fellow conservative Bob Dole realized that the right had shifted so far toward the extreme that their views were considered liberal.
By the time GW Bush had become President, elected twice, conservatism had come to stand for a kind of anti-intellectual mashup of any beliefs that would allow the white working class to believe that it was an exceptional and wonderful group of people, compared to everybody else. The core belief was, "This is the way we live and everybody else should, too." Things that made white people uncomfortable were bad, things they liked were good, because God made it that way.
The Family Research Council calls itself a Christian group, but the beliefs they promote are not to be found in any Christian scripture. There's nothing about "traditional marriage" in the Bible, for instance, in fact there are all kinds of living arrangements in the Bible, many of which the FRC would oppose. There is almost no mention at all of homosexuality, certainly Jesus never mentioned it, and the FRC's positions are the direct opposite of the philosophy that was taught by Jesus Christ. The group exists to put a presentable face on the loathsome beliefs of those who now call themselves conservatives, to market conservative beliefs under cover of real-sounding research and statements by real-sounding authorities.
It is a Christian group in the sense that a church can be an authoritarian community that promotes a kind of prudish conformity. There can be something heartwarming and even helpful about a preacher telling his people to get their act together, and I don't blame anybody for attending services and enjoying them, but it is important to distinguish between the sense of community you get from belonging to a group and the actual scriptural teachings of a religion.
The FRC and similar groups take something peripheral to Christianity and put it at the center. Jesus, at the real center of Christianity, would have invited LGBT people into his tent, he would have taken joy in their love and blessed their marriages, but some fire-and-brimstone minister will point a blaming finger at sinners in the pews and that is the part the Family Research Council has adopted, the blaming finger. And they point it at people who do not belong to their congregation.
This is the worst of America. It is not the America that believes in freedom and opportunity for all, it is the opposite of that, and we need to shake ourselves occasionally to wake up and realize how crazy it is to take these guys seriously at all.
Milbank might be right, the Family Research Council might be a mainstream conservative think tank. But Aravosis is right, too, it is a hate group by any reasonable standard.
Required reading: John Aravosis' rebuttal on AmericaBlog explains exactly why FRC is a hate group. It is a long post with lots of quotes and links. Only those who are actually motivated -- LGBT people and straight allies, that is -- will read it, but you should follow his reasoning and his references.
At one point, I had the Congressional Research Service send me a copy of every single document the Family Research Council had written about gays, and then I had CRS get me every single document listed in the FRC doc's footnotes. I.e., all the "original sources" for the Family Research Council's anti-gay claims.Read it. Bookmark it.
And there were a lot of them. At the time, FRC's list of footnotes could be nearly as long as the written part of the document itself.
What did I find when I went through the original sources cited in the footnotes? I found that nearly every single footnote was a lie. Not a lie in the conventional sense - meaning, they didn't make up a source that didn't exist. Rather, they did things like quoting a damning opinion from a judge in a court case without mention that the judge was in the minority, that the gays had actually won the case they were citing.
Or they'd quote a study with a hideous conclusion about gays and lesbians, only for you to realize later that the actual quote in the study was rather benign - instead, FRC "forgot" to put and end-quotation mark on the quote, added an ellipse, and then put their own damning conclusion.
OK, there is no doubt that FRC is a hate group. Milbank says "it’s absurd to put the group, as the law center does, in the same category as Aryan Nations, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Stormfront and the Westboro Baptist Church," but it is not absurd. The Family Research Council is just like those groups. Maybe slicker than some of them, but just the same.
But really, that doesn't matter right now, they are what they are. I am interested in the idea that hate has become a "mainstream conservative" value.
There used to be something scary called "conservatism." Barry Goldwater was the figurehead and the spokesman for the movement. Conservatives were brash, outspoken, belligerent, and opposed to mamby-pambyism of any sort. It was the far right of American politics, and reasonable people were alarmed. They tacitly supported segregation (aka "states' rights") and loudly supported war, with nuclear weapons if possible. Scary, dangerous people with wild, un-American, totalitarian ideas.
By 1998, even Goldwater and fellow conservative Bob Dole realized that the right had shifted so far toward the extreme that their views were considered liberal.
By the time GW Bush had become President, elected twice, conservatism had come to stand for a kind of anti-intellectual mashup of any beliefs that would allow the white working class to believe that it was an exceptional and wonderful group of people, compared to everybody else. The core belief was, "This is the way we live and everybody else should, too." Things that made white people uncomfortable were bad, things they liked were good, because God made it that way.
The Family Research Council calls itself a Christian group, but the beliefs they promote are not to be found in any Christian scripture. There's nothing about "traditional marriage" in the Bible, for instance, in fact there are all kinds of living arrangements in the Bible, many of which the FRC would oppose. There is almost no mention at all of homosexuality, certainly Jesus never mentioned it, and the FRC's positions are the direct opposite of the philosophy that was taught by Jesus Christ. The group exists to put a presentable face on the loathsome beliefs of those who now call themselves conservatives, to market conservative beliefs under cover of real-sounding research and statements by real-sounding authorities.
It is a Christian group in the sense that a church can be an authoritarian community that promotes a kind of prudish conformity. There can be something heartwarming and even helpful about a preacher telling his people to get their act together, and I don't blame anybody for attending services and enjoying them, but it is important to distinguish between the sense of community you get from belonging to a group and the actual scriptural teachings of a religion.
The FRC and similar groups take something peripheral to Christianity and put it at the center. Jesus, at the real center of Christianity, would have invited LGBT people into his tent, he would have taken joy in their love and blessed their marriages, but some fire-and-brimstone minister will point a blaming finger at sinners in the pews and that is the part the Family Research Council has adopted, the blaming finger. And they point it at people who do not belong to their congregation.
This is the worst of America. It is not the America that believes in freedom and opportunity for all, it is the opposite of that, and we need to shake ourselves occasionally to wake up and realize how crazy it is to take these guys seriously at all.
Milbank might be right, the Family Research Council might be a mainstream conservative think tank. But Aravosis is right, too, it is a hate group by any reasonable standard.