g********d 发帖数: 4174 | 1 Posted on Advocate.com August 29, 2011 03:35:00 PM ET
Religious Right, Oppressed Minority
By Trudy Ring
TONY PERKINS SPEAKING X390 (GETTY) | ADVOCATE.COM
Those straight white male right-wing Christians keep playing the victim card
. Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, has joined Brian Brown
of the National Organization for Marriage and Republican presidential
hopeful Rick Santorum in casting the religious right as an oppressed
minority.
Speaking last week with conservative radio host Janet Mefferd, Perkins said
LGBT rights advocates “will not be satisfied until those who hold to a
traditional, natural view of marriage are completely silenced.” He was
discussing the recent campaign to get retailers to withdraw from the Charity
Give Back Group (formerly the Christian Values Network), an online shopping
service that allows customers to earmark a portion of their purchases to
benefit nonprofit groups, including antigay ones like the Family Research
Council and Focus on the Family. Macy’s, Microsoft, and Apple are among the
companies that have withdrawn.
“It’s an effort to stigmatize, to marginalize, and ultimately to cause
people to self-censor,” Perkins said of the movement for LGBT equality,
adding that it “is essentially man shaking his fist in the face of God and
saying I don’t need you, that we will do it our way.”
NOM president Brown, in a blog post last week, accused proponents of
marriage equality of trying to make their opponents second-class citizens.
LGBT advocates, he said, want to take away “the rights of millions of
decent, loving, law-abiding Americans.” Santorum, meanwhile, on a recent
campaign stop in Spartanburg, S.C., said gays have launched a “jihad”
against him. Brown’s blog post, by the way, also used that term (meaning “
holy war”) to describe the actions of gays and allies standing up to the
antigay right.
Also, in an interview last week with the Daily Times Herald of Carrollton,
Iowa, Santorum said granting marriage rights to gay couples would “
undermine the institution” and “undermine religious liberty.” He asked,
“Will we go into pulpits and tell preachers they can’t preach that gay
marriage is wrong? Well, maybe not right away, but maybe tax-exempt status
is next.”
Santorum, along with fellow presidential aspirants Michele Bachmann, Rick
Perry, and Mitt Romney, is a signer of NOM’s Marriage Pledge, which calls
among other things for a presidential commission to investigate harassment
of those who support “traditional marriage.” | m******1 发帖数: 19713 | | D**S 发帖数: 24887 | |
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