Tony Perkins is president of the Family Research Council.
Now while indeed the name “Family Research Council” sounds warm, cuddly and acceptable, it is not, because as you might guess their stance is basically religious and so what “promoting family values” means in their reality is opposing social equality and basic human rights. If you are not familiar with them, then here are a few quick facts …
- The Southern Poverty Law Center designated the FRC as a hate group in the Winter 2010 issue of its magazine, Intelligence Report. … described the FRC as a “font of anti-gay propaganda throughout its history”
- Josh Duggar was their executive director (yes, “the” Josh Duggar, the one who fondled five underage girls, was also revealed to have signed up to Ashley Madison, and confused to having a porn addiction).
So here is a recent interview with Mr Perkins that has now triggered even more controversy …
He refers to the Freedom from Religion Foundation as the “Atheist Taliban”.
The folks over at FFRF Tested this assertion and drew up a chart
… and here are the results …
So basically, apart from the observation that Mr Perkins does not resort to violence in order to impose his views, his group, The Family Research Council” is exactly the same as the Taliban in every other way, and the FFRF fails to meet that criteria in every single measurable way.
They also very nicely describe what is actually going on …
After Perkins likened FFRF to a group of terrorists, the student he was interviewing portrayed himself as standing up to FFRF when, as he put it, he “found out that religion was going to be removed from all aspects of our community.” Perkins himself claimed that FFRF wants “to eradicate any reference to god or exercise of religious freedom from the public square.” You’d be hard pressed to find a bigger straw man.
There is a significant difference between “all aspects of our community” or “the public square” and the government. Tony Perkins and his acolyte can worship, read the bible, and pray in public all they like. I genuinely don’t care. What Perkins can’t do is use a government office to promote his personal religion. His confusion over this simple distinction and his hyperbole are symptoms of conservative Christians’ desire to be persecuted. In their minds, being asked to observe the law and this distinction is persecution.
It has been explained to them time after time what secularism actually is, and yet they persist in deliberately misrepresenting FFRF, and that fact alone tells us all a great deal about their complete lack of any actual integrity or honesty.