Republican presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson are slated to speak later this month at an “All Lives Matter” summit, which is trying to use the language of Black Lives Matter protesters to denounce abortion rights. The conference is sponsored by the Freedom’s Journal Institute and the World Congress of Families, a far-right organization that has faced scrutiny for its role in pushing extreme anti-LGBT laws in Russia and around the world.
One conference organizer, Eric Wallace, a black conservative activist whobriefly ran for U.S. Senate in 2010, said in a statement that Black Lives Matter activists are ignoring “the thousands of Black babies killed every day” and “Black on Black crime”:
Current events have called into question (by some) whether Black lives matter. Does Black Life really matter? That is not a new question, Black pro-life groups and others have been asking this question ever since Roe vs Wade. But, where are the cries for the thousands of Black babies killed every day? Where is the outrage for the hundreds of young black males being incarcerated? Or the disgrace concerning Black on Black crime? Where are the voices calling for school choice in public education? And where are those who are truly concerned about issues such as economic empowerment?
The World Congress of Families previously sponsored another Wallace conference: The Black Conservative Summit, where Wallace delivered a speech blasting the theory of evolution.
Under the banner of defending “the family,” the World Congress of Families supported a Russian ban on speech considered to be pro-LGBT “propaganda” as it helped right-wing activists to build up a Religious Right infrastructure in the country. One group spokesman hailed Russian leaders as “the Christian saviors of the world” for “preventing [gays] from corrupting children.”
It is rather fitting that Huckabee and Carson, two candidates who regularly claim that Americans, and conservatives in particular, are losing their freedom of speech, are aligning with a group that supports the criminalization of free speech on LGBT issues.
