#1207: Richard Thompson

Richard Thompson is the President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center (more here), a Michigan-based Christian legal advocacy organization created in 1999 by Thomas Monaghan – the founder of Dominos Pizza – and famous for instance for taking the case of the defense of the Kitzmiller v. Dover case. The organization is currently devoted to all sorts of wingnut cases, such as challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare, and in 2001 it notoriously sued the San Diego chapter of Planned Parenthood to force it to inform women of a non-existentlink between abortions and breast cancer. The Center even has Michele Bachmann on their Citizens Advisory Board, which should tell you quite a bit about what kind of organization we are dealing with.

Richard Thompson is really your standard wingnut (though he probably knows the law slightly better than the Liberty Counsel) – the kind who claims that America will “disintegrate” because of the homosexual agenda and Obama. Also, Christians are persecuted – by a government whose goal is to ban the Bible. Where does he get the information? "I want to turn around and praise WallBuilders because you are giving the kind of information that people have to have to understand what is going on, to understand the history of our nation.” Yes, that’s WallBuilders, the organization of fraudulent revisionist David Barton.

The Center is really a conspiracy hub. In 2012, for instance, they tried to argue that the Muslim Brotherhood helps run the military and the FBI (thereby jeopardizing America’s survival, of course). Thompson, predictably, is no fan Muslims. Take this claim, for instance, and notice how the argument is premised on the asumption that Muslims, as a group, are the enemies in an ongoing war. What, by the way, happens when Muslims refuse to accept The American Way? Well, then the fundies sue them for discrimination, like Thomas More Law Centre’s Brian Bolling, representing Gerald Marszalek (who used his position as assistant high school wrestling coach to convert Muslim students to Christianity) here (which includes Thompson’s own comments on the events).

Another interesting illustration of the mind of Richard Thompson is here.

Diagnosis: Fundie who apparently hates the Consitution because it appears to grant rights also to people he disagrees with. Of course, that’s not how Thompson wants to see it, so instead, and in a true Orwellian fashion, he tries, desperately and incoherently, to portray himself as defending the Constitution.