Nine Senators Want to Honor the Anti-LGBT (and Anti-Semitic) Paul Weyrich

by Michael Jones · 2009-03-26 11:57:00 UTC
Topics:

Paul Weyrich

Nine Republican Senators have signed onto a Senate bill (S.Res. 79) that would honor the life of Paul Weyrich and express the condolences of the Senate on his passing. Weyrich died in December 2008. For those who don't know Weyrich, he was the founder of the Heritage Foundation, and may be the man more responsible than any for the creation of the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition of the 1980s.

Wearing those monikers, one would expect Weyrich to have been staunchly opposed to LGBT rights. He was. Among his more volatile nuggets on the subject:

1. Homosexuals tend to be preoccupied with sex … I don't care whether they take exception to it - it happens to be true. … it's not my opinion, it's the opinion of many psychologists and psychiatrists who have to deal with them.

2. Permitting same-sex marriage will help lead to more homosexual adoptions which will almost certainly make children from fractured backgrounds even more confused in their interactions with society.

3. Give same-sex couples the “right” to marry and we can expect some severe consequences. For one, the concept of faithfulness to one’s spouse will be further undermined given that many so-called committed homosexual partners have a high rate of multiple sexual partners outside their relationship. Don’t expect a civil union or marriage certificate to change this.

OK, so it's bad enough that these nine Senators want to recognize a man who spewed venom toward a large chunk of this country.  But Paul Weyrich also categorized Jews at Christ-killers.  Worse, according to this piece on HuffPost, when a conservative commentator named Evan Gahr called Weyrich out for his anti-Semitism, Gahr was chastised by a large swath of neoconservatives, had his writing pulled from the conservative publication FrontPageMag, and was forced to apologize to Weyrich.

The idea that the Senate now wants to honor a man who accused Jews of murdering Christ and accused LGBT people of being pre-occupied with sex and a danger to children is enough to make anyone's skin crawl.  Yet that's not stopping these nine Senators - including Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida, who happens to represent a State with the third largest Jewish population in the country - from tag-teaming with the Christian Coalition to officially honor Paul Weyrich.

And conservatives are skewing Barack Obama for not focusing on the country's problems?  Puh-lease.

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
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