Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus insists that the GOP’s opposition to marriage equality must be “draped in the concepts of grace, love and respect” … and what better way to show it than partnering with two radical anti-gay groups to send 168 RNC members to Israel.
Priebus is working with David Lane, founder of the American Renewal Project, and the American Family Association to organize a week-long trip to Israel for committee members, paid for by Lane’s group and the AFA. Sen. Rand Paul and Gov. Rick Perry have previously traveled to Israel on tours sponsored by Lane, who also joined Mike Huckabee’s recent European tour.
Proudly working “under the radar,” Lane is a conservative activist who assembles summits in key primary states where pastors and likely presidential candidates meet, including Paul, Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Mike Pence and Bobby Jindal, who is sponsoring a prayer rally with Lane early next year. Lane’s group announced a plan to recruit 1,000 pastors to run for elected office and produced election-themed ads featuring Cruz, Perry, Jindal and Huckabee.
Lane seeks to keep a low profile, in part, to conceal his extreme rhetoric, such as his claim that “homosexuals praying at [Obama’s] inauguration” would cause God to allow “car bombs in Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Des Moines, Iowa,” his call for conservatives to “wage war” to stop “the pagan onslaught imposing homosexual marriage [and] homosexual scouts” and his attacks on Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith.
Despite this track record, Priebus has praised Lane and his concerns about America’s dark future.
The other sponsor of the RNC trip, the American Family Association, also attacked Romney’s faith and has decried homosexuality in similar terms, insisting that homosexuality should be outlawed and praising draconian anti-gay laws in countries like Uganda and Gambia. The AFA’s chief spokesman, Bryan Fischer, has likened homosexuality to terrorism and blamed the Holocaust on gay people, and said that non-Christians have no First Amendment rights and non-Christian immigrants should be forced to convert to Christianity.
Fischer has repeatedly defended the massacres and expulsions of Native Americans from their lands as divine justice and once lamented that welfare makes African-American women “rut like rabbits.”
We look forward to Priebus explaining how David Lane and Bryan Fischer are simply trying to address key social issues with “grace, love and respect.”
