GOProud

Last year we wrote about how CPAC allowed notorious white nationalists to speak on multiple panels but banned the gay conservative group GOProud. This year the CPAC organizers, who aren’t entirely oblivious to the 2012 election, are trying to emphasize diversity. There’s even a panel entitled, “Conservative Inclusion: Promoting the Freedom Message to all Americans,” which boasts a racially diverse lineup of conservative activists.

“Conservative inclusion” is a nice idea, but it doesn’t go very far at CPAC. For the second year in a row, the gay conservative group GOProud has been banned from the conference. So at best, “inclusion” at CPAC means “straights only.”

Even more telling is the roster of sponsors and exhibitors at CPAC. Most troubling is the inclusion of the anti-immigrant group ProEnglish, which is run by longtime white nationalist organizer Bob Vandervoort. The Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights has reported extensively on his activities:

Vandervoort was at the center of white nationalist activity during his time in Illinois. While he was in charge, Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance often held joint meetings with the local chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens. The group held events featuring numerous white nationalist figures. Vandervoort also made appearances at white nationalist events outside Illinois, for instance participating in the 2009 Preserving Western Civilization Conference.

When CPAC and its organizers at the American Conservative Union were widely criticized last year for allowing Vandervoort and other white nationalists to speak on multiple panels, the conference organizers played dumb:

“This panel was not organized by the ACU,” CPAC spokeswoman Kristy Campbell told The Daily Caller, ”and specific questions on the event, content or speakers should be directed to the sponsoring organization.”

There’s no such excuse this year. CPAC knew all too well about Vandervoort’s white nationalist background and yet they allowed his group to return. Apparently “conservative inclusion” means shunning gays while including racists.

The reality is that CPAC couldn’t open its doors to gay conservatives even if it wanted to. As Brian reported last week, the head of CPAC sponsor Accuracy In Media is not only pleased with the GOProud ban, he wants to see a panel at the conference on “the dangers of the homosexual movement and why some of its members seem prone to violence, terror, and treason.”

Another important sponsor is the Family Research Council, which has been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-gay hate group. The group’s top policy expert, Peter Sprigg, explicitly supports the criminalization of homosexuality, and readers of this blog are familiar with FRC’s aggressive and dehumanizing advocacy against gays and lesbians. There is no compromising on gays with extremists like these.

As we’ve reported, GOProud isn’t the only group banned this year. Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, co-founders of the Freedom Defense Initiative, are vicious Islamophobes and conspiracy theorists. Had CPAC banned them for spreading lies and fomenting hate against Muslims, it would be a sign of progress. But Geller and Spencer were really banned for having made the mistake of extending their Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy theory to include two American Conservative Union board members, Suhail Khan and Grover Norquist.

In past years, ACU has happily given Geller and company a platform to bash Muslims. And Spencer, who runs the blog “Jihad Watch,” overwhelmingly won this year’s CPAC People’s Choice Blogger Award. But their paranoid rantings hit too close to home this year, so CPAC pulled the plug. Even “conservative inclusion” has its limits.

On Friday's episode of "The Janet Mefferd Show," Matt Barber was interviewed to give his thoughts on "the GOP and their buckling stance on homosexuality." Barber was, not surprisingly, highly critical of any effort by the Republican Party to try to appear less openly-hostile to gays and blasted the party for even letting groups like GOProud and the Log Cabin Republicans or pro-gay donors have a seat at the table. 

Such groups were, Barber asserted, really just gay activists in disguise who are intent destroying the Republican Party from within.  As such, they and like-minded donors have "poisoned" the GOP and need to be "rooted out" because the "most important election in history" is approaching and the party cannot risk alienating its Chick-fil-A-loving, anti-gay base at a time like this:

You know, that's all we need is the Republican Party looking more and more like the Democratic Party. What the Log Cabin Republicans are doing here - and let's be very clear here; groups like GOProud and the Log Cabin Republicans who call themselves Republican or conservative, they're just a bunch of radical homosexual activists in conservative or Republican clothing. These guys know exactly what they're doing, they're trying to undermine the Republican Party from within I believe intentionally, I believe it's covert and they know what they're doing.

So this does not bode well, the fact that the Republican Party is even entertaining these radical activists here and they're looking at essentially spending a dollar to save a dime - I mean, imagine alienating the entire base of the Republican Party in order to appease a few radical homosexual activists; it's counter-intuitive, it's thick-headed, and this is the most important election, I think, in history that we have coming up right now, and now is not the time for the GOP to be alienating the base of the party.

...

They are not conservatives. They are liberal Republicans more suited to the Democratic Party but fiscally conservative, oftentimes, and so they have essentially poisoned, in large degree, the Republican Party and, I think, need to be rooted out.

You know, we saw what the base of the Republican Party believes with the overwhelming outpouring for Chick-fil-A, for natural marriage, for traditional values and for the Republican Party to even entertain the idea because a few of these donors have deep pockets of running afoul of these traditional values that the Republican Party platform has been based on for years, it's just a stupid idea.

WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah has for years been waging a war against the gay conservative group GOProud, and attacking the American Conservative Union for allowing GOProud to participate in its annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). But this year, under new leadership, the ACU has decided to kick GOProud out of CPAC and has instead invited Religious Right luminaries and past CPAC-boycotters Mike Huckabee and Tony Perkins to address the summit. GOProud also finds itself in hot water after allegedly outing over Twitter a pollster for Rick Perry’s campaign in response to a controversial ad maligning gay soldiers. Conservative smear artist Andrew Breitbart quit GOProud’s advisory board in response to the outing, leading Farah to gloat, “I told you so.”

In an editorial today, Farah slams GOProud by tying the group to President Obama and his administration’s LGBT rights directive. “It was the political left that birthed the homosexual agenda by asserting what people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms was a private matter – only to make it everyone's business,” Farah writes. “Now, under Barack Obama, the U.S. federal government is to become a global sex cop and make LGBT status as a preferential designation for immigrants into the country.” He goes on to say that supporting gay rights is incompatible with the conservative movement and calls GOProud “an enemy of conservatism inside the gates”:

I hate to say, "I told you so."

Andrew Breitbart is learning the hard way what it means to be a "conservative."

And it doesn't mean promoting a political organization that seeks to redefine a 6,000-year-old moral code or one that defines itself by its members' own peculiar sexual practices.

…

Any person or group seeking to topple the Judeo-Christian moral code and glorify sin, which is exactly what GOProud is all about, can never be considered "conservative," or the term loses all meaning. It is the political left that separates people by sex, by race, by ethnicity, by social standing, by income and through a thousand other classifications in an effort to divide and conquer in the name of greater state control.

It was the political left that birthed the homosexual agenda by asserting what people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms was a private matter – only to make it everyone's business. Now, under Barack Obama, the U.S. federal government is to become a global sex cop and make LGBT status as a preferential designation for immigrants into the country.

I have no doubt these policies will please the extremists at GOProud. Any group or individual who supports same-sex marriage, hate-crimes laws and radical social engineering in our military can never be considered "conservative."

…

Will Ann Coulter, who sits on that same GOProud advisory board, finally get a clue?

Will Grover Norquist, who sits on that same advisory board, have an epiphany now?

Will the rest of the conservative movement finally comprehend what these people are doing?

It's time to recognize what GOProud truly is – an enemy of conservatism inside the gates, the well-funded, well-heeled, perpetrators of a "homo con," a term the group affectionately uses for its own fabulous confabs.

WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah today declared that it’s “time to dump Grover Norquist” and kick him out of the conservative movement, adding his name to other right-wing activists like Frank Gaffney, Pamela Geller, Don Feder, Tom McClusky and Erick Erickson who want to give Norquist the boot. Farah said that Norquist’s “decision to bless GOProud,” the gay conservative group which has Norquist on its Advisory Council, shows that he is “unashamedly pro-perversion.” In addition, Farah said that Norquist, who helped found the Islamic Free Market Institute, is “shockingly pro-Islamist and has used his well-developed connections in Washington to spread the tentacles of stealthy jihad through the corridors of power, including the White House.”

Farah ended his column by calling on the American Conservative Union and the National Rifle Association to force Norquist off their boards and to “dump him as the economic guru of the conservative movement and Republican Party”:

I say this not only because of his decidedly Shariah-friendly activities and associations.

I say it not only because of his decision to bless GOProud, a faux conservative group promoting the homosexual agenda to Republicans.

I also say it because Norquist represents all that is wrong with the so-called "economic conservatives" in our midst – a group that turns out to be not so conservative on economics once you scratch beneath the surface of what they are saying and doing.

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Grover Norquist is not a conservative true believer. He may have been at one time. But he is no longer – that's for certain. Maybe, like other politicians, he's just been around Washington too long. Here's the scorecard you should consider:

• He's shockingly pro-Islamist and has used his well-developed connections in Washington to spread the tentacles of stealthy jihad through the corridors of power, including the White House.

• He's is unashamedly pro-perversion, given his position on the advisory board of GOProud.

• And he is a phony economic conservative who helped mislead tea-party Republicans in control of the House of Representatives this year giving Obama all the money he needed to keep destroying the free-enterprise system through the end of his term.

What am I missing here?

It's time to dump Grover Norquist – dump him from the ACU board, dump him from the NRA board and dump him as the economic guru of the conservative movement and Republican Party.

Last week, GOProud announced that Ann Coulter would be joining the organization’s Advisory Council as Honorary Chair where her official title would be "Gay Icon."

Coulter's willingness to serve in this capacity has created utter confusion for the hosts of the American Family Association's "AFA Report" where Fred Jackson, Ed Vitagliano and Buster Wilson were left wondering just how on earth Coulter can do this and still consider herself to be a Christian:

Vitagliano: Ann Coulter is hard to read but if you're a Christian, I think you should take more care to tailor your commitments in things like this to your Christian views. I don't know whether she just hasn't thought this through or what, but this is kind of disappointing to me.

This is not an issue, I don't think, that you clown around with. This is a very serious issue. I know she likes to laugh, she likes to have fun with her politics, but this is not an issue that you clown around with. It has serious real-world repercussions.

Jackson: I think it begs the questions then Buster: how must Ann Coulter feel about the authority of Scripture? How can you join a group like this and allowed to be called the honorary chair and gay icon of the group and still feel comfortable calling yourself an evangelical Christian? There's a gap there in the reasoning.

Wilson: I don't know. It raises a huge red flag for me. The Bible has got to be the standard and it's not.

• Miranda @ PFAW Blog: Did Whole Foods Cave to Anti-Muslim Extremists?
• Towleroad: Ann Coulter Joins Board of Gay Conservative Group GOProud.
• Dan @ TFN Insider: Saving America from Marxists and Progressives!
• Alvin McEwen: Sign the Petition and get Congress to call out false anti-gay testimony.
• Carlos Maza @ Equality Matters: State Sodomy Laws Continue To Target LGBT Americans.
• Travis Waldron @ Think Progress: Bachmann’s ‘Must-Read’ List Included A Book That Claims Blacks Were ‘Better Off In Nearly Every Way’ Under Slavery.
• Mark Potok @ Hatewatch: Court Dismisses Case Involving DHS Extremism Report.

• Joseph Farah celebrates CPAC's dumping of GOProud.
• Get your tickets for the forthcoming anti-Palin documentary "Sarah Palin — You Betcha."
• Rick Perry says he has "no idea what God's plans are for me, but I'm going to try to be as faithful to him as I can be" in deciding to run for president.
• On a related note, perhaps all the talk of Perry shaking-up the GOP race is just that.
• Finally, I can't wait to see the National Organization for Marriage maintain its anti-boycott stance and start going after the American Family Association.

• GOProud has reportedly been dumped by CPAC, though the group insists that it has not officially been informed.
• WorldNetDaily continues to promote "The Pink Swastika."
• Harry Jackson and Tony Perkins complain that when the government helps those in need, it robs Christians of an opportunity to evangelize.
• Florida Gov. Rick Scott will not attend "The Response" but will send a video message.
• Bryan Fischer is disappointed in Herman Cain for apologizing for his anti-Muslim statements.

WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah says that he would rather see the “break-up of the nation” than allow marriage equality for gays and lesbians anywhere in the United States. While criticizing Texas Gov. Rick Perry for saying that he believes New York has a right to decide its own marriage laws (although he supports the Federal Marriage Amendment), Farah contends that the country should dissolve itself to stop marriage equality:

My view of Perry changed from favorable but skeptical to highly unfavorable overnight this week after I read his comments to GOP donors in Aspen, Colo.

Essentially, Perry said he is just fine with New York state's decision to approve same-sex marriage.

"Our friends in New York six weeks ago passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the same sex," explained Perry. "And you know what? That's New York, and that's their business, and that's fine with me. That is their call. If you believe in the 10th Amendment, stay out of their business."

Of course, GOProud, the homosexual Republican group, was quick to praise Perry for his stand. I'm sure Perry is very proud of that endorsement.

What's wrong with his answer? So much it would take me more than one 750-word column to explain. But I will attempt to address his cowardly surrender of the national culture succinctly.

If America is to rediscover its greatness, citizens of all 50 states will need to rediscover the common values that brought us together as a nation in the first place – not just all go out and do our own thing, with every man doing what is right in his own eyes. The only viable alternative is, quite literally, a break-up of the nation.

What Rick Perry is advocating here is cultural surrender.

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This would have been a more thoughtful response from a genuine Christian conservative from Texas: "Marriage between one man and one woman is the building block of any functional self-governing society. Abandoning a critical, time-tested, biblical institution like marriage – or redefining it according to a faddish new notion of political correctness – will have profoundly negative effects on any community, state or nation that tries it. I hope and pray New Yorkers challenge the decision by the legislature in New York because I can't believe it actually reflects their views. If we can't agree on fundamentals like marriage, the very fabric of what binds Americans together is becoming so badly frayed that we may have to consider going our separate ways."