A who’s who of right wing politicians, religious right spokesholes, and anti-gay loons have signed a statement opposing the Southern Poverty Law Center’s classification of many far right religious organizations as hate groups. LGF reader Gus 802 pasted together this picture of the statement, which they placed as an advertisement at Politico:

The fact is, the groups on the SPLC’s list are unarguably spreading falsehoods and hatred for gay people; the Southern Poverty Law Center responds to this ludicrous example of right wing persecution politics here, with numerous examples of their sick agenda and appalling hate speech: SPLC Responds to Attack by FRC, Conservative Republicans.

Consider a few of the comments about gays and lesbians that have come from some of the groups now denouncing character assassination. The FRC, in a booklet entitled Homosexual Activists Work to Normalize Sex With Boys, has claimed that “one of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order.” The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer wrote this year that “[h]omosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and 6 million dead Jews.” Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel, which was not listed by the SPLC but helped organize today’s newspaper ad, describes relationships between gay men as “one man violently cramming his penis into another man’s lower intestine and calling it ‘love.’” Officials of several, including the FRC, have called for criminalizing gay sex.

Almost all the religious-right groups named by the SPLC also have engaged in a particularly toxic and widespread defamation of gay men: The claim that they are essentially pedophiles who molest children at far higher rates than heterosexuals.

In fact, this became the crux of my “debate” with the FRC’s Perkins — the claim, as he put it in the very last moments of the show, that “the research is overwhelming that homosexuality poses a danger to children.” To prove this, Perkins cited an outfit called the American College of Pediatricians, which certainly sounded authoritative. But he was being less than honest, to say the least. In fact, the American College of Pediatricians is a tiny group that broke away from the real professional association — the similarly named American Academy of Pediatrics — specifically because that 60,000-member organization had endorsed gay and lesbian parenting. Perkins’ move was enough to cause Chris Matthews to run a special segment two days later that explained the difference between the academy and the so-called college.

The reality is that virtually all real researchers in the field have concluded, as did the American Psychological Association in an official statement, that “homosexual men are not more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual men are.”