Texas Chapter of Anti-LGBT Hate Group Mass Resistance Launches, Helmed by Robert Oscar López

According to the Mass Resistance website, the Texas chapter was started and is headed by Robert Oscar López, a well-known anti-LGBT activist who claims to be bisexual. He’s best known because of his claims that he grew up with a bisexual mother and her female partner, and that such a household made him “strange” and set him back in terms of learning “social norms.” He thus opposes same-sex marriage and parenting, and these views have earned him a spot on the anti-LGBT speaking circuit.

Mass Resistance Texas (MRT), which appears to have launched in February, has already been lobbying the state legislature against trans access to bathrooms, and is holding an event Saturday, April 1 at Oak Meadow Baptist Church in Austin called “Stand for the Sanctity and Health of the Family: Action and Education Meeting.” According to the group’s website, the event includes a “panel of experts and activists” who will arm citizens with tools to “fight back against several topics,” including transgender bathroom access, school curriculum and “efforts to make Texans believe the gay marriage issue is lost for good.”

MRT appears to be specifically targeting the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an organization that advocates for LGBT equality, at this event. A post on its website dated Feb. 28, notes that “This April 1, the Austin community and the Texas public at large will hear about what the Human Rights Campaign is doing in the Independent Austin School District.” According to the blog, “HRC’s normalization of homosexuality” begins with its Welcoming Schools materials, which include lesson plans and resources for teachers and parents to develop more inclusive classrooms for all students.

Contrary to what López and others opposed to it seem to claim, the Welcoming Schools materials are not mandatory, and instead provide guidelines and resources for teachers and schools wanting to provide a more welcoming learning environment for students.

Nevertheless, López talked with Sandy Rios of the anti-LGBT hate group American Family Association on her radio program earlier in March about the Welcoming Schools program, and claims that it’s a terrible thing HRC is doing, and provided an outline of what will occur at the April 1 meeting.

According to López, Mass Resistance Texas will walk participants through the open records law in Texas,  distribute “fact sheets” and “basic information” on the Human Rights Campaign, provide guidelines on contacting elected officials and pressuring local groups as well as information on scripture that demonstrates specifically that Christian parents cannot go along with this kind of curriculum. They will also put  together a 12-week program to learn to counter the arguments of supporters of Welcoming Schools.

López’s targeting of HRC isn’t surprising, given his history in the anti-LGBT right and battles against same-sex marriage and LGBT equality. His activism includes other claims, including that the “gay lobby” (which he differentiates from LGBT individuals) is fascist, abuses women and children, is an engine of “world-historical evil” and that gay adoption means that “children become objects, and adults become slave-owners again.” He has also claimed that there is an LGBT international war against black people, and that same-sex couples “purchase” children, which is tantamount to slavery, that gay men sexually abuse their children and, in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in 2015 that “gay marriage targets children of gay parents for discrimination” because it will “allow adults to acquire custody of other people’s children and deny those children connections to their original mother and father.”

López was formerly based in California, where he taught English and classics at California State University at Northridge. He resigned his position in June 2016 amidst allegations of retaliation against students who accused him of creating a hostile learning environment. Now he is teaching at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas.

Though he’s been out of the public eye for a number of months, he has continued his writing, and just recently self-published a book with help from Mass Resistance titled Wackos Thugs and Perverts: Clintonian Decadence in Academia, in which he blames Bill and Hillary Clinton for corrupting academia since 1990, and that “virtually all movements in the academy that claim to be about race are really about LGBT ideology.” According to López, Hillary Clinton’s “tyrannical model of political warfare by emotional manipulation is safe and unflappable in academia, waiting to regroup and re-install the dictatorship their party enjoyed during the decadent late years of Obama.” He has also written fiction, including the gay sex-heavy Johnson Park: Five Gay Boys, One Street, Too Much Shade (currently unavailable).

It remains to be seen what impact, if any, López and his chapter of a virulently anti-LGBT hate group will have on state legislative and educational policy, but regardless, he’s sure to garner attention.