Southern Baptist pastor Mark Harris, who is running in a hotly contested GOP primary to take on Democratic North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan, launched his political career by driving the successful campaign to ban same-sex marriage and civil unions in the state constitution.
It should come as no surprise then that Harris will join some of the nation’s most fervent opponents of gay rights at the April 24 North Carolina Regional Briefing, hosted by the anti-gay Family Research Council. Speakers joining the GOP hopeful at the event include:
Patrick Wooden
The North Carolina preacher alleged during the marriage amendment campaign that gay men “have to wear a diaper or a butt plug just to be able to contain their bowels.”
He reiterated his claim in follow-up interview where he insisted that he knows of gay men who have “literally died in diapers” because they “have stretched their anuses, their sphincter muscles” with baseball bats, cell phones and animals:
I know of a case where in a hospital a homosexual male had a cellphone lodged in his anus and as they were operating on him the phone went off, the phone started ringing. There’ve been instances where men have put bats, baseball bats, in their rectums.... Even the homosexual lobby knows, those who are pro-homosexual, they know that they cannot win the argument describing what it is that these people actually do to each other, the objects, the animals in certain cases, the little gerbils; thank God I’m a human being!
Wooden has also called homosexuality “wicked, deviant, immoral, self-destructive, anti-human sexual behavior,” said Tyler Perry and Chaz Bono are under Satan’s influence, warned that Glee promotes “a wicked, perverse lifestyle that destroys people” and described violence against gay people as “normal.”
E.W. Jackson
The pastor and failed GOP Virginia lieutenant governor candidate drew wide notoriety for his claims that gay people are “degenerate,” “perverse” and “very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally.”
He has also warned that homosexuality “poisons culture, destroys families, destroys societies [and] brings the judgment of God unlike very few things that we can think of,” adding that it is driven by “spiritually darkened” people who seek to “recruit” others.
Jackson has linked homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia, feared that Obama “will force schools to start teaching all children homosexuality” and criticized gay rights advocates and progressives for having supposedly “ done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and slavery and Jim Crow ever did.”
He even labeled the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell an “abomination” and said that God will punish the military for allowing openly gay service members, remarks he later denied making even though they were captured on audio and videotape.
Rick Scarborough
The Texas-based Religious Right leader has built a career around stoking fears that Christians will face imprisonment, persecution, communism and concentration camps if gay marriage becomes legal. He also says that gay people should be only referred to as “sodomites” and should “hang their heads in shame.”
Scarborough blamed the 2012 Benghazi attack on “the assault on God’s institution of marriage,” insisted Obama’s opposition to Russia’s anti-gay crackdown will lead to God’s judgment on America, described AIDS as divine punishment for gay “immorality” and called for a “class action lawsuit” against homosexuality.
Ron Baity
The North Carolina pastor who leads Return America, a group which pushed the marriage amendment, has said that “homos” are worse than maggots and akin to murderers.
He has also alleged that gay people are making society “more filthy” and bringing about divine punishment in the form of an “urban renewal program,” adding that “perverted” gay people should be “prosecuted” before they cause the “death” of America.
“Since they cannot produce they must recruit young people to their perverted, warped agenda. One cannot think of anything more nauseating, debased, lewd and immoral than recruiting precious young people into such shameful conduct,” he wrote in a Return America newsletter.
Tony Perkins
As leader of the Family Research Council, Perkins defended Uganda’s “kill the gays” bill and connected homosexuality to a whole host of evils, including death, sexual assault, depression, suicide, government population control, and child abuse. He has even compared homosexuality to shootings, kidnappings and alcoholism.
Perkins has also said that gay rights advocates are using “disgusting” anti-bullying programs in schools to “recruit” children, arguing that gay youth shouldn’t be affirmed for who they are since they intrinsically know they are “abnormal,” leading to depression and suicide.
The FRC head told one Religious Right group that gay rights advocates are “hateful” pawns of the Devil.
