This year's Values Voter Summit is history. The annual Washington D.C.-based event, organized by the FRC, and sponsored by numerous right-wing organizations including Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, was reportedly the best-attended Summit in its history.

The weekend went just about as it always does: a whole lot of bashing (Obama as usual, and a surprisingly ugly attack on Mormonism; a Rick Perry-supporting pastor called it a cult); a batch of demonizing (gays); and Republican Party presidential candidates (except John Huntsman) tripping over themselves to win the hearts of the attendees (amidst questions about ballot-stuffing, Ron Paul won the straw poll and Herman Cain came in second).

Simultaneous to the Summit, the Family Research Council announced that it was launching a "Values Voter Bus Tour," which "will travel the country over the next year mobilizing new voters and bringing a message of real hope and change."

According to a an FRC Press Release, the Values Voter Bus (VVB) will be joined by presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann, for events in New Hampshire, and it "will then travel to the swing states of Ohio and Missouri." FRC's VVB "will travel through other battleground states, including North Carolina and Minnesota which have marriage amendments on their ballots."

`The Anti-Gay Lobby'

Just prior to the convening of the Values Voter Summit, the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project issued a report titled "THE ANTI-GAY LOBBY: The Family Research Council, the American Family Association & the Demonization of LGBT People" (http://www.lgbtqnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Anti-Gay-Lo bby.pdf).

"Together, the Family Research Council (FRC) and the American Family Association (AFA) may comprise the most important anti-gay lobby in this country," the report's executive summary states. "Equipped with a $12 million budget and led by [Tony Perkins] a former Louisiana state representative, the FRC is politically powerful, with its spokesmen appearing regularly in the national media and many friends on Capitol Hill. The AFA, a sponsor of the FRC's Values Voter Summit, has a $20 million budget and a network of about 200 radio stations, is regularly quoted in the press, and has worked to organize grassroots Christians to lobby for its goals. The FRC and the AFA are certainly among the most powerful groups on the American religious right."

Amongst the things that tie the FRC and AFA together is their animus towards LBGT people:

"They have both regularly pumped out propaganda asserting that gay men molest children at far higher rates than their hetero- sexual counterparts -- a claim that has been debunked by virtually all the recognized scientific authorities in the field. 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.

"The AFA has declared that `homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler ... the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews,' suggested that gay sex be punished like heroin use, and said that the `homosexual agenda' endangers `every fundamental right' in the Constitution, including religious freedom. Both groups have enthusiastically promoted `reparative therapy,' which claims against the bulk of the evidence that it can `cure' gay men and lesbians and make them heterosexual, but in fact has left a string of people behind who were badly hurt by the process."

While the FRC and AFA are not the sole proprietors of anti-gay bashing, they are two organizations that carry great weight within conservative Christian circles.

"The Family Research Council is a linchpin in the American anti-gay movement, and one that regularly engages in baseless defamation of LGBT people," Mark Potok, Director of SPLC's Intelligence Project, said in an email. "Along with the American Family Association, it makes up the hard core of the religious right's anti-gay lobby, and like AFA it regularly poisons the public debate with falsehoods that take us further away, rather than closer, to solving our collective problems."

Neither the FRC nor the AFA take any responsibility for the alarming rise in hate crimes against LBGT people. According to an SPLC study "based on an analysis of 14 years of FBI hate crime data, ... LGBT people were by far the American minority most victimized by such crimes. They were more than twice as likely to be attacked in a violent hate crime as Jews or black people and more than four times as likely as Muslims. And that doesn't include the anti-gay bullying that has resulted in so many teen suicides."

Last year, the SPLC began listing the FRC and AFA as "hate groups." The FRC and AFA earned its listing, not because they are Christian-based organizations, nor because of their conservative political advocacy. Rather, they earned the listing because of the "groups use of known falsehoods to attack and demonize members of the LGBT community."  

"Late last year, Perkins complained in full page ads that the SPLC would not debate the [hate group designation]-- in spite of the fact that he and I had, in fact, debated on national television the very issues that he claimed we wouldn't debate," Potok added.  

"What's more, Perkins claimed that the American College of Pediatricians had proven that `homosexuals are bad for children,' meaning they molest children at disproportionate rates. What he didn't say was the American College of Pediatricians was not the pediatric professional association -- that would be the American Academy of Pediatrics, with some 60,000 members. The American College of Pediatricians, as it happens, is a tiny group that broke away from the real professional association specifically because it did not believe that gay parents were good for children.

"Tony Perkins says he is a serious Christian. He should pay more attention to the commandment that says one should not bear false witness," said Potok.

The listing of both groups brought forth a deluge of criticism from religious right organizations. Warren Throckmorton, a professor and past president of the American Mental Health Counselors Association, found the SPLC's listing "legitimate and have damaged the credibility of the groups on the list. Going forward, I hope Christians don't rally around these groups but rather call them to accountability."

The Family Research Council

Founded in 1983, the Family Research Council became a division of Dr. James Dobson's Focus on the Family in 1988 and was headed up by Gary Bauer, a former undersecretary of education under President Ronald Reagan, and who later became a failed presidential candidate. Although it separated from FoTF in 1992, "Dobson and two other Focus officials joined the FRC's newly independent board."

According to "The Anti-Gay Lobby," the non-profit FRC "continued its work in `pro-family' areas, working against abortion and stem cell research, fighting pornography and homosexuality, and promoting `the Judeo-Christian worldview as the basis for a just, free, and stable society.'"

The group's anti-gay thrust was accelerated when Robert Knight, a long-time conservative writer and journalist, was hired to head up the organization's cultural affairs department. Knight's anti-gay work propelled the FRC into the forefront of anti-gay groups. He "penned anti-gay tracts that used the research of thoroughly discredited psychologist Paul Cameron, head of the Colorado-based hate group the Family Research Institute. Knight authored numerous anti-gay papers, and even used Cameron's infamous `gay obituary' study in testimony he offered before Congress to oppose the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) in 1994." Knight also co-authored a 1999 booklet titled Homosexual Activists Work to Normalize Sex with Boys. (Knight subsequently moved on to Concerned Women for America and now, according to the report, he is a senior writer as Coral Ridge Ministries.)  

In 1999, Gary Bauer moved on and Ken Connors took his place. Connors lasted only a short time before the current FRC head, Tony Perkins, took the helm. Perkins, who controversial past regarding issues of race is detailed in the SPLC report, helped transform the organization into the lobbying and financial powerhouse that it is today.

"Under his leadership," the report points out, "the group continues to peddle its false claims about gays and lesbians and has made combating the `homosexual agenda' a seemingly obsessive interest." Perkins makes regular appearances on the 24/7 cable television news networks and right wing talk radio, issues a daily "Tony Perkins' FRC Action Update," has partnered with Bishop Harry Jackson, a virulently anti-gay African American pastor, to write "Personal Faith, Public Policy." He also chairs the Family Research Council Action PAC.

Over the years, Perkins has wandered into the debate over immigration, stem cell research, Israel, and was a significant player demonizing Michael Schiavo during the Terri Schiavo affair.

During a 2005 interview, Americans United's executive director the Rev. Barry Lynn told me that he had  "worked in Washington a long time, but I've never seen anything as manipulative as what Perkins and the FRC did over Terri Schiavo. They took a terminally ill woman and turned her into a political tool to gain leverage in Congress."

But he has drawn the organization's line-in-the-sand over LBGT issues.

Over the past few years the FRC has: promoted anti-same-sex marriage initiatives in states across the country; worked to ensure "that the `Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) policy in the military remained in place, although it was, in fact, repealed in 2011"; waged a smear campaign against Kevin Jennings, whom kPresident Obama appointed Assistant Deputy Secretary at the Department of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, and Jennings' former organization Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GSLEN).

Perhaps most egregiously, especially when it comes to the well-being of children, Tony Perkins' Family Research Council continues to insist that bullying of gay students in the public schools - some cases of which have led to suicides of gay youth - does not deserve special attention.

Last year, Perkins' wrote a column in The Washington Post's On Faith blog that suggested that gay organizations were "exploiting these tragedies [suicides]": "[s]ome homosexual activist groups lay blame" for the suicides "at the feet of conservative Christians who teach that homosexual conduct is wrong .... homosexual activist groups like GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) are exploiting these tragedies to push their agenda of demanding not only tolerance of homosexual individuals, but active affirmation of homosexual conduct and their efforts to redefine the family."