Inside the Fear Mongering Anti-Gay Crusade

You don’t get any more anti-gay than the Family Research Center (FRC), which launched a new campaign recently to save marriage by combating “fake” (i.e., gay) marriages in the United Sates.

“2012 could be the ‘tipping point’ year in the battle for marriage,” their website reads. “The Left has launched the deceptive ‘Commitment Campaign’ to mislead Americans and impose affirmation of same-sex ‘marriage’ — fake marriage — on every state, county, city, school, and workplace. Family Research Council needs your immediate help to tip events for marriage by exposing and opposing the Left’s campaign, which could stop fake ‘marriage’ permanently.”

“FACT!” the site fear-mongers in bright red font. “School children will be indoctrinated. Fact! You will lose religious freedoms. Fact! Lives will be ruined by deception.” This is the video they currently have on their site:

As the news site LGBTQ Nation points out, the FRC’s vitriol is nothing new:

The FRC has had a long history of demonizing the LGBTQ community, which has led to its designation by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a certified “hate group.”

The FRC has claimed that gay activists “work to normalize sex with boys,” seek to “abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order,” and support anti-bullying programs solely in order to promote homosexuality.

In recent weeks, as marriage equality laws have passed in the Maryland and Washington state legialtures, coupled with judicial rulings that have declared anti-gay marriage laws in California and the federal “Defence of Marriage Act” (DOMA) as unconstitutional, the FRC has reacted by ratcheting up its extreme rhetoric.

In the words of the FRC:

Family Research Council believes that homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large, and can never be affirmed. It is by definition unnatural, and as such is associated with negative physical and psychological health effects. While the origins of same-sex attractions may be complex, there is no convincing evidence that a homosexual identity is ever something genetic or inborn.

Header image by Ludovic Bertron (Flickr).