Family Research Council (FRC) President Tony Perkins has responded to gay activist Dan Savage's criticisms.

During an address at Winona State University, Savage, the editor of Seattle alternative The Stranger and a co-founder of the It Gets Better Project, denounced Perkins, saying that “every dead gay kid is a victory for the Family Research Council.”

Perkins “sits on a pile of dead kids every day when he goes to work – and he calls himself a Christian” and “tells the parents of queer kids to do what Tony Perkins damn well knows drives those kids to suicide – doubles their already quadruple risk of suicide.”

In an appearance on Mike Huckabee's radio show, Perkins suggested that the FRC is considering taking legal action against Savage.

“As my teenagers would say, he has some issues,” Perkins said. “He is a man with some real deep-seated issues ... and Dan Savage is nowhere near, he's a hundred and eighty degrees from the positions that we have taken. It's wrong and I will tell you this, we are pursuing everything possible to deal with him because he is out of control.”

“This is the bottom line, Mike: is that if you don't embrace and celebrate homosexuality and everything associated with it, then you are intolerant,” he later added. “And the truth of the matter is, let's just be very, very truthful, and that's what we deal in is the truth, that even if society embraced homosexuality, there would never be that sense of self-fulfillment because it's outside the way God created man and woman. And that's the bottom line. They cannot erase that, even if they get every law on the books changed, it will never change that.”