This weekend, the tenth annual Values Voter Summit (VVS) will take place at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. The event, put on by a number of anti-LGBT hate groups features anti-Muslim and anti-LGBT activists prominently this year.
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, the third most powerful Republican in the new House of Representatives, has apparently survived the storm.
Hate and antigovernment 'Patriot' groups are down by about a fifth as activism shifts to cyberspace and lone wolf actions
Update: The RNC voted yesterday to censure its member Dave Agema for posting material on social media that is insensitive to gays, Muslims and African Americans. Ironically, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus is working closing with a group, American Family Association, that could be described in the exact same way.
The recent scandal that erupted over Rep. Steve Scalise’s speaking appearance before David Duke’s white-supremacist organization, the European-American Union and Rights Organization (EURO), inevitably meant that mainstream media would be turning to Duke himself for answers to their questions. And indeed, Duke was interviewed on several media outlets early this month, on CNN and on Fox News.
Faced with an exploding crisis sparked by the revelation that the No. 3 Republican in the House gave a speech to a well-known group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis a dozen years ago, the GOP in Rep. Steve Scalise’s home state of Louisiana is doubling down, calling the entire episode a mere “manufactured blogger story.”
The incoming majority whip in the U.S. House says he didn’t know the views of a racist group founded by neo-Nazi David Duke when he spoke to it in 2002. But as the SPLC’s Mark Potok writes, his claim is impossible to believe. Scalise was a state representative and an aspiring national politician at the time, and EURO was well known as a hate group led by America’s most famous white supremacist.
A coalition of human rights groups is calling on members of Congress and other public officials not to speak at the upcoming Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., because the event host and its key co-sponsor – the Family Research Council (FRC) and the American Family Association (AFA) – have long records of vilifying the LGBT community and spreading other forms of bigotry.
