Brian Camenker

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post arguing that Tea Party activism has become the face of the conservative movement, so much so that just about every conservative organization and activist is now tying their own agenda to the Tea Party bandwagon in an effort to co-opt and exploit it, obscuring the original Tea Party agenda and rendering the entire discussion of the movement as an entity increasingly moot, as "Tea Party" it is now becoming just another way of saying "right-wing."

To demonstrate what I mean, just take a look at this article:

A diverse mix of longtime Southie conservatives and young professionals packed a standing-room-only Tea Party launch meeting yesterday, energized by Scott Brown’s U.S. Senate win and mobilized by ire at Washington.

“The Tea Party is a movement of all the heroes of this country,” South Boston Tea Party organizer Susan Long told a crowd of 65 gathered at the Perkins VFW Post.

The meeting was part of a burgeoning GOP grassroots revival from Boston to the Berkshires.

Long, a nurse and mom of four, spoke on conservative themes - anti-abortion, low taxes, small government. Brian Camenker, a Newton anti-gay activist, also spoke, and GOP gubernatorial candidate Christy Mihos, Shrewsbury Rep. Karyn Polito and former City Council candidate Doug Bennett also attended.

Camenker runs MassResistance, an anti-gay group so militant that it is one of the few classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

From its inception, MassResistance has focused on nothing beyond furthering their anti-gay bias, only now Camenker is passing it off as Tea Party activism.

Whatever Tea Party activism meant when it first emerged has been lost as the "movement" continues to get co-opted by traditional right-wing and Religious Right activists.

The organizers of the How to Take Back America conference kicked off the event on Friday afternoon with a press conference, and they hit a lot of the highlights we can expect to revisit this weekend:  America is either following the classic model of a Marxist takeover on its way to being an eastern bloc country, or it's on the verge of a Nazi-like dictatorship, or both.  Health care reform is about rationing, euthanasia, and pushing the elderly and vets off a cliff.  The "radical homosexual activist movement" is the biggest threat to religious liberty, and ENDA is a bid to "criminalize Christianity."  Legalized abortion is "black genocide."

As California prepares to vote in November on whether to keep same-sex marriage, the Massachusetts legislature is reconsidering the Jim Crow-era law restricting out-of-state gay couples from marrying if their home state prohibits it. Repeal of the 1913 law passed the state Senate Tuesday with no objections. And the far Right is furious.

Brian Camenker of MassResistance called yesterday’s voice vote “cowardly” and “sleazy,”  claiming that gays had taken over the state:

[Camenker] watched his state senate in action and described it as "completely orchestrated" by homosexual activists.

"It was horrible," he said. "It was as if the gays were playing them like a violin."

The voice vote, "was just a sort of murmur and that was it," he said.

"I'll tell you there's no more democracy in Massachusetts, no constitutional government. They were completely being run by the homosexual lobby," he said.

Camenker warned that repeal of the restriction would “cause havoc” for other states, and Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality called it “a recipe for chaos.”

"Obviously, what the homosexuals are trying to do is to create a tidal wave for homosexual...marriage, build up a number of states [that] are allowing either civil unions or homosexual...marriage, and then have a favorable case before the Supreme Court, which grants this nationally," explains the pro-family activist, noting that only a Defense of Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution could prevent the court from doing that.