Activist: Anti-gay Right, Tea Party Living in Dangerous Marriage of Convenience

Posted Friday, September 10, 2010 by Matt Comer

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  • Activist: Anti-gay Right, Tea Party Living in Dangerous Marriage of Convenience
Waybe Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out, speaks at anti-Dobson protest.

SOURCE: Flickr / gayliberation

Wayne Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out, says religious right figures, like Dobson, Gallagher and others, have spent more and more time building closer relationships with Tea Party movements. He says it is a “marriage of convenience,” despite poll after poll showing LGBT issues usually aren’t on the radar for many Tea Party enthusiasts.

There was quite the buzz around Glenn Beck’s Lincoln Memorial gathering and rally on Aug. 28. Campus Progress had plenty of great coverage, including video from the event itself and Shani Hilton’s hilarious “Tips for Tea Partiers Coming to D.C. for Glenn Beck Rally.”

Media Matters this week released their list of religious right figures cozying up to Beck while building support for his event and other Tea Party movements. The list includes plenty of infamous names, especially for those in the LGBT community: Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, WallBuilders’ David Barton, National Organization for Marriage’s Maggie Gallagher, Cornerstone Church’s John Hagee, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s niece Alveda King, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and former Southern Baptist Convention president Charles Stanley.

Many of Media Matters’ list of “Beck’s Anti-Gay Army of God” are members of the TV/radio host’s new “Black Robe Regiment.”

Activist Wayne Besen, who has a long history in the LGBT advocacy community, is founder and executive director of Truth Wins Out, a non-profit group documenting and exposing the lies, mischaracterizations and damage done by anti-gay religious leaders. Besen says many anti-gay and “ex-gay” leaders and organizations are “charlatans.”

Besen says religious right figures, like Dobson, Gallagher and others, have spent more and more time building closer relationships with Tea Party movements. He says it is a “marriage of convenience,” despite poll after poll showing LGBT issues usually aren’t on the radar for many Tea Party enthusiasts.

“They are riding on these events [like Beck’s Aug. 28 rally] because they are failing on their own,” Besen says. “I’ve been to several high profile religious right events this year and they’ve all been attended primarily by the same religious right figures at Beck’s rally.”

He says several events have seen very low turnouts and were “spectacular failures.”

“Their movement is losing steam,” Besen says. “By being at that rally, they got a little bit more legitimacy and they gave Glenn Beck a little bit more religious cred. It is a mutually beneficial relationship: Glenn Beck needs their religious credibility and because the religious right has failed so miserably they need him for his popularity. Clearly they are not succeeding on their own or exciting audiences like they use to.”

Besen warns the new partnership between Tea Partiers and anti-LGBT religious right movements poses a particular danger to LGBT Americans.

“Ultimately, the people at the top of the Tea Party movement don’t give a shit about gay rights,” Besen says, also maintaining the Tea Party’s economic and social movement is more “astroturf” than grassroots. “They care so much about tax cuts at the expense of anything else in America, so the danger to LGBT rights is that in order to accomplish their agenda, these few rich people and Wall Street conservatives will support anti-gay people just to get their tax cuts.”

For more on Beck’s “Black Robe Regiment,” check out this transcript of a revealing and interesting Beck interview with WallBuilders’ David Barton.

Matt Comer is a staff writer for Campus Progress.

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