The Family Research Council (FRC)
continues to deny it's a hate group, claiming its goal is to debate
gay rights.
The group is pushing against recent
claims by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a group that tracks
more than 1,000 hate groups in America, that the FRC is a hate group.
The designation puts the Christian
conservative group on the same list of hate groups as the Ku Klux
Klan, the Nation of Islam and the Aryan Nations.
In an interview with The
Christin Broadcasting Network, the FRC's Peter Sprigg defended
his group's rhetoric as policy debates.
“I don't expect everyone to agree
with some of the things that we assert about the homosexual lifestyle
but we do present evidence in support of those assertions. And they
are certainly not falsehoods or fabrications,” Sprigg said.
Sprigg went on to defend his claim that
most men who engage in molesting boys “identify themselves as
homosexual or bisexual.”
“There is significant evidence in
support of the position that we've taken. And we don't think the
debate should be shut off by these gratuitous charges of hate,”
Sprigg said. (The video is embedded in the right panel of this
page.)
Research on the subject, however,
suggests that most abusers identify as straight or have no interest
in consensual sexual relationships with adults.
In 1978, after screening nearly 200 men
incarcerated in Massachusetts for molesting children, Dr. Nicholas
Groth concluded that “the adult heterosexual male constitutes a
greater risk to the underage child than does the adult homosexual
male.”
In
a July 1994 paper titled Are Children at Risk for Sexual Abuse by
Homosexuals? published in
Pediatrics,
researchers looked at the abusers of 269 children and concluded that
the children were “unlikely to have been molested by identifiable
gay or lesbian people.”
The
SPLC's Mark Potok told CBN that “the FRC does engage, certainly in
our view, in the propagation of known falsehoods in an effort to
defame gay people.”
In
an appearance on Fox
& Friends,
Tony
Perkins, the president of the FRC, denied he hates gay people.
“No.
Not at all,” Perkins said, then quickly added that, “homosexual
behavior is harmful not only to society, but more importantly to the
individuals who engage in that behavior.”
Sprigg
has called for the re-criminalization of gay sex. When asked in
February 2010 by MSBNC host Chris Matthews if “gay behavior”
should be illegal, Sprigg answered “yes.”