As Ted Cruz manages to make a fool of himself on the national stage (and therefore make himself a star among the wingnuts) and enrage even his conservative colleagues in Washington, religious right leaders are lining up to practically put his face on Mt. Rushmore. Right Wing Watch rounds up some of the praise, like this from Tony Perkins:
The Family Research Council is holding its annual Values Voters Summit in a couple weeks and when people sign up to attend the event they are sent an email from Tony Perkins. But as my friend Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State points out, most of that email consists of this pretty famous fake quote from James Madison:
After refusing a few months ago to even pass a shareholder resolution to offer discrimination protection for LGBT employees, Exxon has now decided to offer benefits to same-sex partners in those states that recognize such marriages as legal.
So says a Nigerian grad student, who also claims to have discovered all kinds of other truths. Chibuihem Amalaha, a chemical engineering grad student, says he has proven using physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics that gay marriage is just plain wrong.
Tony Perkins welcomed Rep. John Fleming to his radio show this week and they made the ridiculous and hypocritical argument that same-sex marriages could be shams just to get benefits — as if opposite-sex marriages could not be the same thing.
The rulings in the two marriage equality cases came down very much like I expected, though with an unpredictable lineup in one of them. In United States v Windsor, the DOMA case, the court ruled 5-4 that Section 3 of DOMA is unconstitutional and that the federal government must grant full recognition to all same-sex marriages performed in states where they are legal. You can read that full ruling here. Kennedy wrote the opinion, joined by the four liberal justices on the court (Breyer, Sotomayor, Ginsburg and Kagan).
FRC Action, the lobbying wing of the Family Research Council, has hired Josh Duggar, one of the 19 kids in the reality show 19 Kids and Counting, to be their executive director. He has very little political experience, but that doesn’t seem to matter. FRC’s Tony Perkins seems to think the kids these days will love him:
As the right wing continues to throw a temper tantrum over the Boy Scouts of America making a small, tenuous and incomplete step toward equality, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, an Eagle Scout himself, told the FRC’s Tony Perkins that the board members who voted for the new policy will have to answer to God.
Alex Jones says the government did it. The Worldnutdaily has blamed both North Korea and Iran. Tony Perkins blames sexual immorality. Glenn Beck says Al Qaeda did it and the government is covering it up. But Rush Limbaugh has found the real culprit: College professors.
Dave Agema, the former Michigan state legislature and now a member of the Republican National Committee, is ignoring the first rule of holes. Already getting hammered even by his fellow Republicans for his virulently anti-gay statements, he went on Tony Perkins’ radio show and compared gay people to alcoholics.
A lot of people know about Griswold v Connecticut, which said states can’t ban the use of contraception by married couples. But a few years later, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the court extended that to non-married people. Pat Fagan, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, went on Tony Perkins’ radio show and said that this ruling was wrong and that any “functioning society” should ban all sex outside of marriage:
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
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