As Kyle pointed out a few weeks ago, people who hate gay people sure do seem to love Ted Cruz.
Today, Cruz can add another name to his long list of anti-gay endorsers: Mission America’s Linda Harvey, who as a columnist and host of a conservative radio show spreads some of the most extreme anti-gay rhetoric in the country.
Harvey announced her support for Cruz in a joint press release with a number of Ohio conservatives, including Phil Burress of Citizens for Community Values and Molly Smith of Cleveland Right to Life. The release directs supporters to the website of Keep The Promise, a pro-Cruz Super PAC led by Religious Right activist David Barton, but the endorsements have not been promoted by the PAC or the Cruz campaign, at least not yet.
Perhaps Harvey thinks that Cruz will be the president she has longed for who will issue “an Emancipation Proclamation … to free America from the tyranny of sodomy.”
Harvey, who is boycotting so many pro-LGBT businesses that she complains she is running out of places to shop, has just this year:
- Claimed that efforts to combat bullying of LGBT young people amount to “sexual abuse.”
- Said that gays “were not born this way, but created through sexual indoctrination” and now want to recruit kids in turn.
- Worried that LGBT youth are possessed by “demonic spirits.”
- Said that gay pride parades are signs of God’s impending judgment on America and “ought to be banned.”
- Backed Jamaica’s law criminalizing homosexuality.
- Said she actually loves gay people, but supporting gay rights is “the least compassionate, the meanest and most hateful thing you can do” because that will “accelerate and confirm this behavior in more and more people in our country.”’
Harvey has also advised parents not to let gay doctors or nurses treat their children, even when they’re hospitalized, and has insisted that “there is no proof that there’s ever anything like a gay, lesbian or bisexual or transgendered child, or teen or human.”
Burress and Smith also have anti-gay records that allow them to fit right in with their fellow Cruz supporters. Burress, whose Citizens for Community Values is the Ohio state affiliate of the Family Research Council, was an influential player in the passage of waves of anti-gay-marriage legislation in the 1990s and early 2000s, although his true passion is fighting against pornography. Smith, the head of Cleveland Right to Life and a leader of the fetal personhood group Personhood Alliance, has clashed with the National Right to Life Committee over her anti-gay activism.
Both Burress and Smith have fought to stop the Republican Party from becoming too friendly to gay people, attacking Ohio Sen. Rob Portman when he came out in favor of marriage equality. Burress, who called Portman “a very troubled man,” urged the senator to put his gay son into ex-gay therapy and later vowed to run a primary challenger against him.
