Justice Sunday Preachers

The Nation | Article | Justice Sunday Preachers | Max Blumenthal

Max Blumenthal in The Nation reveals that Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, the main sponsor of Bill Frist and friends' Justice Sunday broadcast attacking Democrats this weekend has a history of rubbing elbows with white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

Four years ago, Perkins addressed the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), America's premier white supremacist organization, the successor to the White Citizens Councils, which battled integration in the South. In 1996 Perkins paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,000 for his mailing list. At the time, Perkins was the campaign manager for a right-wing Republican candidate for the US Senate in Louisiana. The Federal Election Commission fined the campaign Perkins ran $3,000 for attempting to hide the money paid to Duke.

As the emcee of Justice Sunday, Tony Perkins positioned himself beside a black preacher and a Catholic "civil rights" activist as he rattled off the phone numbers of senators wavering on President Bush's judicial nominees. The evening's speakers studiously couched their appeals on behalf of Bush's stalled judges in the vocabulary of victimhood, accusing Democratic senators of "filibustering people of faith."

Atrios' comment on the matter is golden:

Robes... He no likey the black ones, but he likey the white ones.

Indeed.

Again we have to ask the question: Who exactly is it that the Republican leadership is whoring itself out to as they fall under ever more control by the extremists?

I can anticipate the obfuscation employed by the apologists on the right about Perkins already... He was merely a speaker at the CCC event - he had no idea what it was all about... The David Duke Mailing list debacle was the fault of an overzealous staffer who was terminated... The anti-faith left is raising these issues as an act of desperation... The left can't stand a man of faith and therefore will stop at nothing to discredit those who are fighting for the restoration of god's glory in government.

What Republicans should do it make it very clear that first, they do not support the likes of Perkins. Next they should announce that they will not tolerate their leadership in the Senate rubbing elbows with Perkins or anyone like him. Frist must make a statement apologizing for his association with Perkins and he must unequivocally and unambiguously denounce him.

I won't hold my breath.

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