Religious Right, Oppressed Minority

Those straight white male right-wing Christians keep playing the victim card. Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, has joined Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum in casting the religious right as an oppressed minority.

Speaking last week with conservative radio host Janet Mefferd, Perkins said LGBT rights advocates "will not be satisfied until those who hold to a traditional, natural view of marriage are completely silenced." He was discussing the recent campaign to get retailers to withdraw from the Charity Give Back Group (formerly the Christian Values Network), an online shopping service that allows customers to earmark a portion of their purchases to benefit nonprofit groups, including antigay ones like the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family. Macy's, Microsoft, and Apple are among the companies that have withdrawn.

"It's an effort to stigmatize, to marginalize, and ultimately to cause people to self-censor," Perkins said of the movement for LGBT equality, adding that it "is essentially man shaking his fist in the face of God and saying I don't need you, that we will do it our way."

NOM president Brown, in a blog post last week, accused proponents of marriage equality of trying to make their opponents second-class citizens. LGBT advocates, he said, want to take away "the rights of millions of decent, loving, law-abiding Americans." Santorum, meanwhile, on a recent campaign stop in Spartanburg, S.C., said gays have launched a "jihad" against him. Brown's blog post, by the way, also used that term (meaning "holy war") to describe the actions of gays and allies standing up to the antigay right.

Also, in an interview last week with the Daily Times Herald of Carrollton, Iowa, Santorum said granting marriage rights to gay couples would "undermine the institution" and "undermine religious liberty." He asked, "Will we go into pulpits and tell preachers they can't preach that gay marriage is wrong? Well, maybe not right away, but maybe tax-exempt status is next."

Santorum, along with fellow presidential aspirants Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney, is a signer of NOM's Marriage Pledge, which calls among other things for a presidential commission to investigate harassment of those who support "traditional marriage."

Listen to Perkins's interview via People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch here.