Anti-LGBT groups, National Organization for Marriage, Family Research Council and CitizenLink have launched a new campaign attacking socially moderate Republicans.
According to a report in Twocare.org the groups, heavily funded by the elite community of hard-right Christian leaders and foundations associated with The Gathering – a yearly meeting of evangelical financiers where New York Times op-ed columnist and All Things Considered commentator David Brooks, as well as Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, will be speaking this year – are launching an ‘unprecedented’ campaign to sabotage the election of socially moderate pro-marriage equality, pro-reproductive rights Republicans.
The biggest foundation at The Gathering, the National Christian Foundation, funds the three groups behind the initiative and may well be the biggest and most prolific anti-LGBT funder in America according to an extensive Twocare.org survey of NCF anti-gay funding.
All three organizations have played significant roles in the World Congress of Families, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBT hate group credited with having helped provoke anti-gay hatred and anti-gay legislation in Russia, states the Twocare.org report.
A special Twocare.org/Center Against Religious Extremism report reveals that from 1997 to 2012 roughly half of the Americans listed as having been speakers at major WCF congresses have been associated with organizations that have received National Christian Foundation funding.
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins personally addressed The Gathering in 2006, in a speech in which Perkins described homosexuality as the second biggest threat to America, surpassed only by Islamic terrorism. During his speech to The Gathering Perkins stated,
“I would say there are two great threats to our nation today,and I don’t think liberals understand either one of them. I think we’re at great threat, externally, from radical Islamists who want to destroy us and our way of life… there’s about forty million of these radical Muslims who simply want to kill us.
The second greatest threat I think this nation faces is internally, and it’s from the radical homosexuals that want to destroy the underpinnings of our nation. And this is not an idle, this is not on idle threat. They are absolutely determined to redefine marriage and with it everything else.
…[Islamic terrorists are] for real and they want to destroy us — But the homosexual, the radical homosexual, wants to destroy our way of life too. They want to bring the rest of the nation down to their point of, really, moral degradation.”
The other group leading the campaign against pro same-sex marriage, pro reproductive rights Republicans is Citizenlink, the 501(c)(4) political action arm of Focus on The Family. The 2012 990 tax form that Citizenlink filed with the IRS (the most recent the group has filed) lists as a board member Anthony Wauterlek – who is also a board member emeritus of the National Christian Foundation, the preeminent foundation represented at The Gathering.
