Family Research Council senior fellow Peter Sprigg appeared today on The Matt Friedeman Show on the American Family Association’s American Family Radio to discuss the budding controversy over the right-wing “charity” service CGBG. The progressive groups AllOut.org and Change.org have persuaded over 200 retailers to leave the CGBG, a for-profit group that allows customers to shop at companies online and direct part of their proceeds to right-wing organizations like FRC and Focus on the Family – success that, unsurprisingly, has got the Religious Right up in arms.
It’s rather ironic that the AFA is helping the FRC denounce the pressure campaign against the CGBG, as the AFA itself led boycotts against Ford, Home Depot, Old Navy, Pepsi, and Glee along with pressure campaigns against Burger King, Toyota, Lexus and Cellular South to stop running ads on Glee and Google and Disney to drop out of the It Gets Better Project. But this double-standard should come as no surprise, as the FRC endorsed the AFA’s boycott campaign against McDonalds and led its own campaign against Wal-Mart.
Sprigg and Freideman alleged that FRC is only facing a backlash from gay rights and women’s rights groups because the group oppose marriage equality. However, the AllOut.org petition urging companies to drop CGBC doesn’t mention the FRC’s position on marriage at all, instead focusing on FRC’s advocacy for laws criminalizing homosexuality, opposition to anti-bullying efforts and dishonest attempts to tie homosexuality to pedophilia.
Sprigg: People are afraid of the homosexual activists and they’re particularly afraid of this character assassination that comes in the form of the word ‘hate.’ Nobody wants to be accused of participating in ‘hate’ and so throwing that word ‘hate’ around becomes a trump card even when nothing that we have done can reasonably be called ‘hate.’ On the contrary, everything we do is motivated by love for the people who are hurt by this lifestyle.
Friedeman: Well, again I think what Tony Perkins has done and Peter Sprigg you by extension, you just say, we’re asking people, and AFA does this all the time as well, you urge retailers to remain neutral in the culture wars, the current cultural battles, particularly when you come down to something like homosexuality.
Such a claim is hard to believe coming from Peter Sprigg, who:
- Said that he would “much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them into the United States because we believe homosexuality is destructive to society.”
- Supported the criminalization of homosexuality.
- Lobbied to make it harder for students to join Gay-Straight Alliances because “homosexuality is harmful to society.”
- Argued that gays and lesbians shouldn’t be judges because a gay judge can’t “be held up as a role model.”
- Linked homosexuality to pedophilia even when scientists rejected their correlation.
- Opposed allowing same-sex partners or their adopted children from collecting their deceased partner or parent’s Social Security benefits.
- Cheered on Lisa Miller after she kidnapped her daughter and fled to Central America in order to evade court order granting custody to her former partner.
But the LGBT community, Sprigg says, should see all these as acts of love.
