Pat Buchanan Blames 'Militant Gay Rights Groups' For MSNBC Suspension

Pat Buchanan has blamed “militant gay rights groups” for his MSNBC suspension.

Buchanan has not been seen on MSNBC since late October, fueling speculation that the network had fired him. Over the weekend, MSNBC President Phil Griffin said that the views expressed by Buchanan in his book Suicide of a Superpower, in which he laments the decline of the nation's “European core,” were behind Buchanan's absence on the network.

During a radio interview with Sean Hannity, Buchanan defended the issues raised in his book.

“It seems to me the issues raised in that book are what I believe are the greatest issues facing the country in the next 25 years,” he said. “And I think they ought to be discussed nationally.”

Buchanan went on to say that Van Jones of the group Color of Change and “militant gay rights groups” were targeting him.

“Look, for a long period of time the hard left, militant gay rights groups, militant – they call themselves civil rights groups, but I'm not sure they're concerned about civil rights – people of color, Van Jones, these folks and others have been out to get Pat Buchanan off TV. This has been done for years and years and years and it's the usual suspects doing the same thing again.” (Listen to the exchange at ThinkProgress.org.)

In October, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation's largest gay rights advocate, called on MSNBC to sanction Buchanan after he called homosexuality “unnatural” during an interview on National Public Radio (NPR).

“I believe that homosexuality is – that it is unnatural activity. Unnatural and immoral,” Buchanan told Diane Rehm, host of The Diane Rehm Show. “I would say that kind of conduct should be discouraged in a good society, in a healthy society.”

“And it used to be discouraged. And I do think that the idea that men can marry men and women marry women in the USA is a sign of a civilization in its final throes. I mean, we saw things like this at the end of the Weimar Republic. Things like this at the end of the Roman Empire. And they are attendant to a declining nation and a declining civilization.”