The Liar Tony Perkins says that questioning the legitimacy of this president’s birth certificate is “a legitimate issue.”
The leader of the anti-gay hate group the Family Research Council defended the birthers while a guest on “AFA Today,” a radio show hosted by Sandy Rios of the American Family Association. Rios has spent most of April pushing a convoluted conspiracy theory arguing that Barack Obama is a Soviet sleeper agent (seriously). Perkins’ comment on Obama’s birth certificate was made in the context of arguing that Rios should not be marginalized for holding such a theory.
Perkins’ long history of making up slanders and slurs about GLBT people — misquoting sources, fabricating “studies,” misquoting experts and otherwise generally bearing false witness against them — resulted in the Family Research Council being formally classified as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But despite Perkins’ untrustworthiness and his record of documented dishonesty, he remains a frequent guest on MSNBC and someone for whom “Hardball” host Chris Matthews regularly provides a national platform.
The clergy activist group Faithful America has been campaigning to get Matthews to stop doing that. Matthews hasn’t defended Perkins or Perkins’ false statements, and he’s told Faithful America that they’re making “a good argument.” But he also said he doesn’t like “censoring opinion” and doesn’t want to give the impression that he’s doing so.
“I’m probably with you on these issues,” Matthews told Faithful America, “but I got to think it through.”
Here’s hoping that Perkins’ endorsement of Sandy Rios’ weird conspiracies, and his defense of birtherism, nudge Matthews in the direction in which he already seems to be leaning. If he was looking for a “why now?” excuse to disinvite Perkins from his show, Perkins just gave it to him.
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While reading the blog over at Faithful America, I also came across Nick Sementelli’s post on right-wing Catholic pundit George Weigel’s gleeful support for the Vatican crackdown on American nuns. American sisters, Weigel sneers, are “more likely to be influenced by the Enneagram and Deepak Chopra than by Teresa of Avila.”
Weigel can be such a smug, over-rated jackwagon that for years I used to confuse him with Robert George. My brain fused the two of them into a single person named “Robert George Weigel.”
Q: Why did Weigel’s “Ethics” and Public Policy Center hire Elliott Abrams?
A: Because Spiro Agnew was dead and Duke Cunningham turned them down.
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Fraidy Reiss describes a world in which the Catholic bishops’ vision of “religious liberty” is made real — a world in which the law defers to religious sensibilities, the devout are granted legal exemptions to the rules that govern everyone else, and women’s freedom and human rights can be swept away in the name of religious tradition.
It’s a Manhattan Declaration dream come true.
But this isn’t a hypothetical scenario. And it isn’t in some far-off country:
Where I come from, girls are married off as teenagers to men they barely know and are expected to spend their lives caring for their husband and children. They are required to cover their hair and nearly every inch of their skin, and to remain behind a curtain at parties and religious events.
Where I come from, if a woman wants to feel her hair blow in the wind or wear jeans or attend college, the courts have the authority to take her children away from her.
Where I come from, you might be surprised to learn, is the United States. Specifically, New York and then New Jersey, in the Orthodox Jewish community.’
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