For the last few weeks, the militantly anti-gay activists at Liberty Counsel, led by Matt Barber, have been threatening to boycott the annual CPAC convention if organizers didn't force the gay conservative group GOProud to withdraw as a sponsor.
Event organizers recently declared that they would not do so, so now Liberty University Law School has withdrawn its own sponsorship, though the affiliated Liberty Counsel will still participate:
Liberty University Law School has withdrawn as a co-sponsor of next month's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington because a Republican homosexual activist group is being allowed to co-sponsor the event.
Liberty University Chancellor Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Liberty Law School Dean Mat Staver had penned a letter to CPAC organizer David Keene last month, requesting that he disallow the homosexual group GOProud from co-sponsoring the conference. The letter was also signed by other evangelical Christian leaders, including Gary Bauer.
GOProud supports, among other things, same-sex marriage and repealing the military's "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy.
Staver reports that he never received a formal response to his complaint, so Liberty University is dropping its co-sponsorship. Liberty Counsel, however, will still have a booth at CPAC.
"Obviously as an exhibitor or participant, you don't necessarily have to think that everyone agrees with you, and some people might even work against you," Staver notes. "But as a co-sponsor, even though not everybody would have the same mission, not everyone would agree with the same tactics, and some would actually focus on economics whereas others might focus on social issues and others might focus on national defense - the fact is they're all conservative in nature. You wouldn't expect, however, a co-sponsor to actively work to undermine another co-sponsor, and that is in fact what GOProud does."
