If there’s one right wing event that sums up the reasons why I ran screaming away from these lunatics more than any other, it’s the Values Voter Summit, put on every year by a devil’s brew of extreme religious fanatics preaching virulent hatred against everyone who isn’t them.

At the Values Voter Summit, you’ll find every sick and twisted right wing meme in existence; open racism, white supremacists, theocrats (real ones, who want to literally replace the Constitution with the Bible), creationists, historical revisionists, End Times believers, hard core misogynists, deranged homophobia and bigotry of all kinds. And those are just the speakers.

This year, as in every year, it’s attended by all the major Republican politicians, sucking up to these freaks for the almighty vote — because the haters have a dedicated base of deluded drones. Their votes can make a difference for Republicans, and the hate groups are always trying to force their primitive beliefs on the rest of America. It’s a match made in hell.

So we have the spectacle of Mitt Romney bowing and scraping in front of an audience that considers Mormons to be one rung above Muslims on the Fundamentalist Ladder of Hatred. It’s pathetic, and it reveals something very disturbing about the people who represent the “conservative movement:” they’re not “conservative” at all, really. The best word to describe the modern right wing and its Dark Ages religious leaders is “reactionary.” These people are deeply afraid of the modern world, and would gladly exchange it for the Spanish Inquisition if they could.

Right Wing Watch has a lot of posts on the Values Voter Summit, which is taking place this weekend in Washington DC. Here’s one of the videos they posted today, featuring religious right leader Robert Jeffress telling his acolytes that the United States is doomed. These are the people to whom the Republican Party is pandering: