The Family Research Council has not yet become as recognized as some of its religious-right brethren — the Christian Coalition, for example, is far better known — but the FRC and its leadership have more power and influence in DC than any other group in the movement. Its president, Tony Perkins, is as serious a right-wing player as anyone in the country right now, as evidenced by his direction of the “Justice Sunday” event last weekend.
Nevertheless, most Americans have probably never heard of Perkins. With this in mind, tidbits like this one from Atrios today are important.
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.
This is the man congressional Republicans have turned to in order to advance the conservative agenda. Indeed, when Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay wanted to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case, who’s the first person they approached for help? Tony Perkins.
Perkins’ problems with race, while disgusting, are just the tip of the iceberg. This is the same religious-right leader who, among other things:
* blamed MTV for the Abu Ghraib scandal
* compared Thomas Jefferson’s wall of separation of church and state to the communists’ Berlin Wall
* believes federal judges who disagree with him pose “a greater threat to representative government” than “terrorist groups”
Remember, Perkins is not just some fringe TV preacher with a public-access show in Alabama; he’s the president of a major right-wing policy group with influence and access to officials at the highest levels of the federal government. The fact that he’s mad as a hatter only seems to help him fit in better.