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SPLC: Family Research Council License-to-Kill Claim 'Outrageous'

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Interesting Times8/16/2012 4:44:52 pm PDT

Here’s the press release from the LGBT rights group Truth Wins Out:

“Truth Wins Out and dozens of major LGBT organizations across the country swiftly condemned yesterday’s shooting at Family Research Council headquarters,” said Wayne Besen, the group’s founder and executive director. “The LGBT community knows all too well the devastating consequences of violence - lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people are harassed, threatened, intimidated, beaten, and killed on a daily basis in violent acts of hatred all over the world, simply because of who they are and who they love. That is why — yesterday, today, and every day — we stand squarely against violence in all its forms, because violence is never a way to resolve political differences or settle disputes.”

“But yesterday’s senseless act of violence does not exonerate the Family Research Council and other anti-gay hate groups from the decades they’ve spent slandering, demonizing, and actively lying about the LGBT community,” added John Becker, TWO’s Director of Communications. “The Southern Poverty Law Center - a venerable civil rights organization that monitors and documents extremism across the country - rightfully labeled the Family Research Council an anti-gay hate group because of its extensive history of spreading malicious, hateful falsehoods about gay people. FRC is not a hate group because of its public policy views, as Mr. Perkins has alleged. It is a hate group because it earned that designation.”

“In his statement today, Tony Perkins expressed appreciation for the LGBT community’s swift repudiation of violence but asked us to go further and disavow FRC’s hate-group designation. Truth Wins Out cannot do that,” concluded Besen. “The Family Research Council says that gays are deviants and pedophiles, strongly promotes fraudulent ‘pray-away-the-gay’ therapy, calls for the imprisonment of gay people, and says that homosexuality is destructive to society. Perkins cannot be allowed to exploit the sympathy rightfully generated by this inexcusable crime to whitewash his group’s ongoing anti-gay activities. If the FRC wants to stop being labeled a hate group, it must stop doing and saying hateful things.”