Peter Sprigg

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.

In May Rep. Pete Stark (R-CA) introduced the Every Child Deserves a Family Act, which prohibits “discrimination in adoption or foster care placements based on the sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status of any prospective adoptive or foster parent, or the sexual orientation or gender identity of the child involved.” While it is unlikely that the GOP-controlled House would approve the legislation, it is an important step in the fight to ensure that children awaiting adoption or foster care can find homes.

But the “pro-family” Religious Right wants to stop the bill in its tracks.

Focus on the Family along with the Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg attacked the bill, claiming that “children will suffer” if it passes:

“We need to do all we can to encourage successful and innovative partnerships, rather than try to shut agencies out of the process,” said Kelly Rosati, vice president of community outreach at Focus on the Family. “It’s the children who will suffer.”

Sprigg agreed.

“This represents one more case,” he said, “in which we are seeing the rights of adults placed ahead of the best interests of the children.”

Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel even alleged that the legislation is unconstitutional and demonstrates how the “homosexual activist political tsunami destroys everything in its path that is righteous, good and beneficial to society”:

At least one pro-family attorney disagrees with the liberal Democrat from California. "This bill has nothing to do with providing adoptive homes for children in need and has everything to do with shutting down all biblically-sound Christian adoption agencies around the country," contends Matt Barber, vice president of Liberty Counsel Action.

And he argues that the proposal is unconstitutional because it violates the freedom of religion, which is protected by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

"This bill puts the [political] demands of selfish, adult homosexual activists...ahead of the welfare of children and religious liberty, and it must be stopped," Barber adds.

So he decides this is the latest example of how the "homosexual activist political tsunami destroys everything in its path that is righteous, good and beneficial to society." He cites a preponderance of studies that conclusively show children are best served in a home with a mother and a father.

The Family Research Council released a pamphlet authored by senior fellow Peter Sprigg about the purported “harm” of marriage equality to American society. Sprigg, who previously said that he wants to “export homosexuals from the United States” because “homosexuality is destructive to society,” discusses the ten reasons he believes that equal rights for gays and lesbians are dangerous, ranging from a “diversity bag” in a Massachusetts school (Reason #2) to the predicted rise of adultery if gays were allowed to marry (Reason #5) and the legalization of polygamy (Reason #10).

First, Sprigg argues that if married gay couples receive health benefits for their families, their relationships would be “subsidized” by the public through entitlement programs. Sprigg finds it deplorable that people would like their spouse or child to receive benefits after they pass away:

Reason #1: Taxpayers, consumers, and businesses would be forced to subsidize homosexual relationships.

One of the key arguments often heard in support of homosexual civil “marriage” revolves around all the government “benefits” that homosexu¬als claim they are denied. Many of these “benefits” involve one thing—taxpayer money that homosexuals are eager to get their hands on. For example, one of the goals of homosexu¬al activists is to take part in the biggest government entitlement program of all—Social Security. Homosexuals want their partners to be eligible for Social Security survivors benefits when one partner dies.

The fact that Social Security survivors benefits were intended to help stay-at-home mothers who did not have retirement benefits from a former employer has not kept homosexuals from de¬manding the benefit.1 Homosexual activists are also demanding that children raised by a homo¬sexual couple be eligible for benefits when one of the partners dies—even if the deceased partner was not the child’s biological or adoptive parent.

Later, Sprigg claims that if gays and lesbians have equal marriage rights, then straight people would be less likely to marry. Why? According to Sprigg, few gay couples would get married if they had the right to, and straight couples would naturally follow their “poor example” and not get married:

Reason #4: Fewer people would marry.

Even where legal recognition and marital rights and benefits are available to same-sex couples (whether through same-sex civil “marriages,” “civil unions,” or “domestic partnerships”), relatively few same-sex couples even bother to seek such recognition or claim such benefits.

…

Couples who could marry, but choose instead to cohabit without the benefit of marriage, harm the institution of marriage by setting an example for other couples, making non-marital cohabitation seem more acceptable as well. If same-sex “marriage” were legalized, the evidence suggests that the percentage of homosexual couples who would choose cohabitation over “marriage” would be much larger than the current percentage of heterosexual couples who choose cohabitation over marriage. It is likely that the poor example set by homosexual couples would, over time, lead to lower marriage rates among heterosexuals as well.

Sprigg also blames marriage equality laws for a fall in the birthrate in certain states, arguing that people would have fewer children if gay couples are allowed to wed. Of course, he uses absolutely no evidence to back up this assertion:

Reason #9: Birthrates would fall.

There is already evidence of at least a correlation between low birth rates and the legalization of same-sex “marriage.” At this writing, five U.S. states grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples. As of 2007, the last year for which complete data are available, four of those five states ranked within the bottom eight out of all fifty states in both birth rate (measured in relation to the total population) and fertility rate (measured in rela¬tion to the population of women of childbearing age).

…

The contribution of same-sex “marriage” to de¬clining birth rates would clearly lead to significant harm for society.

It is no secret that the Family Research Council is absolutely outraged by the fact that it was been designated an anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and has been pushing back in every way it can think of and is even planning on launching an ad campaign to generate support for itself.  

So it came as no surprise that the topic would dominate FRC's most recent "Washington Watch Weekly" radio program to continuing that effort as FRC President Tony Perkins and Senior Fellow Peter Sprigg spent a good portion of the program attacking the SPLC over the designation.

Of course, Sprigg himself is on record saying he wants to see gays exported from the country and that gay behavior ought to be illegal, so it came as no surprise that in defending themselves from the charges that FRC is a hate group, Sprigg and Perkins reiterated many of the same bogus claims that earned them the distinction in the first place, claiming that science supports the right-wing views about homosexuality but that scientists are unwilling to accept those finding:

Perkins: [Repealing DADT] is kind of a crown jewel for the homosexuals really. If they can take over the military and force open homosexuality, very little stands in their way.

Sprigg: That's right. They've already succeeded in taking over, ideologically taking over, the liberal institutions of society - the academia, the news media, and the entertainment media. They want to take over the conservative institutions of society like the military so that there will be no opposition to them at all.

Perkins: So it's really an act of desperation. They've been on the defensive for slapping the label on the Family Research Council and there's some stuff coming out in the days ahead that is really going to push back and put them even more so on the defensive.

But let me zero in on some of the issues they bring up. As I stated earlier, it's all old stuff that's been out there for a long time, so it makes the timing of this very, very questionable. But one of the issues that seems to bother them the most, which I've had to debate now on a couple of TV programs, is the connection between - and this is what the social science, peer-reviewed data shows - a correlation between homosexuality and pedophilia. That seems to be a real problem for them.

Sprigg. Exactly. And yet it's important to spell out what we're saying and what we're not saying on that issue ...

Perkins: It's not what we're saying; it's what the social science professionals ... we take the date, we kind of break it down and communicate it to policy makers, but this is not research we've done.

Sprigg: Oh no, we've just surveyed the research that has been done. Although what's problematic is that a lot of time the researchers are unwilling to accept the logical conclusions of their own findings.