Jun 10, 2005  |  By: DYANA BAGBY  | COMMENTS     

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2003 that the remaining sodomy laws in 13 states were unconstitutional, gay rights advocates celebrated one of their largest victories to date in the quest for equality.

But that decision, Lawrence vs. Texas, also fueled a large and growing conservative religious movement dubbed “the anti-gay industry” by the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, according to Jason Cianciotto, research director for the Policy Institute at the Task Force.

The Lawrence decision, coupled with the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, prompted the religious right to point to the “homosexual agenda” and prompt more virulent anti-gay attacks, said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Montgomery, Ala.-based organization’s recent edition of its quarterly magazine, the Intelligence Report, chronicled the history of anti-gay messages from religious conservatives in a cover story titled, “Holy War: The Religious Right’s Crusade Against Gays Heats Up.”

“Their tone [against homosexuality] has become quite amazing after the Lawrence decision,” said Potok, editor of the Intelligence Report. “What was really striking was while the Klan and neo-Nazis spoke out against the Lawrence decision, the really vicious statements came from well-known leaders of the Christian right.”

After sodomy laws were thrown out and gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts, religious right organizations, including the Alliance Defense Fund, ratcheted up fund-raising efforts and poured millions of dollars into TV, newspaper and radio ads as part of last year’s successful campaigns to ban same-sex marriage in 13 states, including Georgia.

“They profit from homophobia,” Cianciotto said. “They are using anti-gay rhetoric to line their own pockets. They are the modern-day snake oil salesmen.”

Brandon Vallorani, a spokesperson for American Vision, a group dedicated to Christian Reconstructionism that includes supporting the death penalty for homosexuals, declined to be interviewed. But he added that the Southern Poverty Law Center was “sadly mistaken” for listing American Vision as a hate group
‘Bailiwick is extremism’

Gay rights organizations such as the Task Force, the Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal have long been tracking anti-gay groups, including Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America and the Family Research Council. But now the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization known for monitoring hate groups including the Ku Klux Klan, labels them as extremist groups.

Attorneys Morris Dees and Joe Levin founded the center as a small civil rights firm in 1971 in Montgomery, Ala. The organization continues to monitor white supremacist groups as well as the rise of anti-immigration sentiment and other extremist activity. The center never in its 34-year history took aim at the religious right before now, but the rising volume of the national debate over gay marriage puts such groups in the limelight, Potok said.

“Our bailiwick is extremism,” he said. “We’ve avoided the Christian right in the past, and we don’t feel we’ve expanded to include the Christian right — we feel very strongly they have entered our world [of extremism].

“They have gone absolutely wild. The level of personal demonization was really quite remarkable. We felt we had to say, ‘Thus far, no further,’” Potok added.

The magazine devotes 23 pages in its current Intelligence Report to a 30-year history of the religious right’s anti-gay efforts. The report chronicles events from Anita Bryant’s statement in the 1970s that, “Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit. And to freshen their ranks they must recruit the youth of America,” to a recent direct mail campaign from Lou Sheldon, founder of the Traditional Values Coalition. The mailing states, “They [gays] want our preschool children. … They want our kindergarten children. … They want our middle school and high school children.”

“At one time, they rallied around the fear of communism, the fear of mixed-marriage and now the GLBT community. Fear is a great motivator,” said Laura Montgomery Rutt, a former spokesperson for Soulforce, a national gay interfaith organization, who is now chief executive of Envision Marketing & Community Consulting

She said it is important that the center’s report points out that fear is the impetus for religious right groups when it comes to galvanizing its base against gay men and lesbians.

“It is awesome the SPLC has taken the step to put the religious right in the same category as hate groups,” she ...