#316: Tony Perkins

Tony Perkins is the clinically insane, unhingedly despicable president of the Family Research Council (he was previously a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives), a conservative think tank dedicated to bigotry and denialism (see member Charmaine Yoest discuss evolution and the school curriculum here). He also runs the Christian audio streaming site Lightsource.com, which – as such sites generally do – offer hateful bigotry in return for donations. He is a close associate of James Dobson (who founded the FRC) and Albert Mohler, and is also president of the Patriarchy Research Council (which does no research either).

Can you guess what he thinks of same sex marriage? In his own words: “The definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman is rooted in the order of nature itself […] This union can only be protected through amending the United States Constitution. If it's not, activists will continue using the courts to sell a five-legged dog. But as we say where I'm from in Louisiana, 'that dog won't hunt.’” (Here’s a fundraising letter from FRC). His views are apparently shared by his former Louisiana legislative colleague, former state senator Heulette Fontenot, who secured passage of a bill to disallow domestic partnerships in Louisiana or to recognize such relationships approved in other states (relatedly).

Perkins has described the gay civil rights movement as “a movement dedicated to destroying marriage, free speech, public health, religious liberty, and (after the DADT repeal) national security”. His arguments against repealing DADT constitute a colorful lot. Here’s “if the ban is lifted, so many black and Hispanic soldiers will quit that we'll have to reintroduce the draft” (a claim which makes him a racist as well – “it is the blacks and latinos who hate gays, not I”): . Here’s “repealing DADT will provide terrible suffering for the military chaplains”.

He also pandered one of the most atrociously insane anti-gay arguments ever attempted (a sort of self-defeating naturalistic fallacy on meth): “There's no correlation between inacceptance of homosexuality and depression and suicide […] rather […] [t]hese young people who identify as gay or lesbian, we know from the social science that they have a higher propensity to depression or suicide because of that internal conflict. Homosexuality is ‘abnormal’, and kids know it, which leads them to despair.” That’s the nice way of putting it, however – his explanation of how gays are really possessed by Satan is here (first comment wins the Internet).

In fact, he more or less explicitly advocates violence against gays, and locking them up. Hence, he was appointed to serve on Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana Commission on Family and Marriage. 

Perkins has called on Evangelicals, Catholics and Orthodox Jews not to comply with rules and laws permitting abortion, same-sex marriage, and other matters of the anti-life agenda that go against their religious consciences. Here’s Perkins claiming that the courts constitute a greater threat to America than the terrorists, and here is his claim that gays are committing terrorism against the legal system. And here, for that matter, is his claim that advocates of a separation between church and state are terrorists. He is also pathologically hypocritical and virulently opposed to environmentalism. 

In 2010, the Family Research Council was correctly and finally classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Perkins, whose full emotional range seems to span anything from hatred to detestation, dismissed the hate group designation as the result of a political attack by a “liberal organization” and “the left's smear campaign of conservatives”. Apparently quoting Perkins and his group, literally and in context, is “smearing”. That should have made Perkins think twice. Obviously it won’t.

Perkins is indeed another, and rather spectacular, example of the hysterical paranoia and batshit conspiracy mongering – fueled by a persecution complex of incomparable unhingedness – that people like Perkins suffer from. You sort of see the engine winding up: “The liberals disagree with me; therefore, the liberals criticize what I say; therefore the liberals are in a conspiracy and out to get me. This is just like the persecution of Christians in Ancient Rome. Therefore the liberals want to destroy me and ban Christianity. And they want to do the same to you".

You can see Perkins’s take on keeping it real here, and a fine example of what “family values” amount to here.

There’s a decent Perkins resource here.

Diagnosis: An abhorrent human being. Extremely dangerous