Earlier this week, Focus on the Family’s James Dobson went after Barack Obama with a vengeance. Today, the Family Research Council, which Dobson helped form, goes after Obama on abortion.
The ad, which will reportedly begin airing today in Cincinnati, Dallas, and Atlanta, features Obama telling a church congregation, “We need fathers to recognize that responsibility doesn’t just end at conception.”
FRC President Tony Perkins is then shown, baby on his knee, thanking Obama for “promoting fatherhood,” before asking, “If, as you say, fatherhood begins at conception, when does life begin?” Or more to the point, “If I became a father at conception, when did Samuel here become my son?”
Perkins told the NYT the thinking behind the ad: “Barack Obama has made some very important points in his speeches, particularly his speech about fatherhood, but there is a disconnect between when he is saying and the political positions he has taken, and if he is going to be pro family he has got to be pro family.”
To be pro-choice, according to the FRC, necessarily disqualifies someone as “pro-family.”
Asked why the FRC’s anti-Obama ad and Dobson’s anti-Obama attacks came within a few days of each other, Perkins said it was a coincidence.
Maybe that’s true; I have no idea. It is pretty clear that the religious right movement is feeling rather panicky about Obama, though, because we never saw anything like this in the summer of 2000 or 2004.
It’s worth noting who Perkins is, because while he’s a major powerhouse in religious right circles, he’s not nearly as well known as characters like Dobson and Pat Robertson.
Perkins isn’t a household name, but he’s as serious a right-wing player as anyone in the country right now. When the Republican Party and evangelical activists organized “Justice Sunday” events to promote Bush’s judicial appointees, GOP leaders turned to Perkins to organize the events. 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.
But if we look a little closer at Perkins, we see a rather radical figure. I’m reminded of anecdotes like this one:
[In 2001], 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.
More recently, Perkins blamed MTV for the Abu Ghraib scandal; compared Thomas Jefferson’s wall of separation of church and state to the communists’ Berlin Wall; and argued that federal judges who disagree with him pose “a greater threat to representative government” than “terrorist groups.”
When members of Congress invited a Hindu leader to deliver an invocation, Perkins rallied the opposition, insisting that no one outside the Christian or Jewish communities should be allowed to lead official congressional prayers.
And just this past December, when a madman when on a shooting rampage in Arvada, Colo., Perkins announced that “the secular media” was to blame.
And now, he’s starring in anti-Obama commercials. I wonder if he might inadvertently be doing Obama a favor.
Post Script: By the way, why would the FRC bother airing this ad in Houston?