In an interview yesterday, the Family Research Council’s Travis Weber lauded the millions of people who attended marches in response to the terrorist attack at the office of Charlie Hebdo by likening their efforts to the campaign by Religious Right groups to repeal nondiscrimination ordinances that protect LGBT people.
Speaking with “Washington Watch” guest host Craig James about the attempt to rescind a nondiscrimination ordinance in Plano, Texas, Weber predicted that more people would get involved in the crusade to strip legal protections from the LGBT community, just as the Paris attack spurred countless people to take to the streets to defend the freedom of expression.
“I think it comes down to a connection that people make to their own freedom and their own lives and the way they’ve been living in freedom being threatened. When they realize that’s threatened, they care all of the sudden about the issues and get involved,” Weber said. “I think it’s important to take notice of several things going on currently here and overseas. Just recently we’ve seen in France over a million turn out in support of free speech and in solidarity with the publishers of the magazine that was recently the subject of the incident over there and this is something that people see their way of life being threatened.”
“We have generally broad protections for free speech here at home yet we can’t be lax or lazy in protecting them and arguing for them and for their importance and we see these threats overseas; people need to understand that the same freedoms here at home hang in the balance and they need to be protected and fought for when people want to restrict others based on the content of their speech or their viewpoint on a politically unpopular topic. People need to see this and when they do, they’ll care.”
Of course, nothing in these non-discrimination ordinances curtail the freedom of speech.
