Peter LaBarbera’s Illinois Family Institute identifies itself as an independently financed partner of Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, and the Alliance Defense Fund.
His career has been spent protesting against communism, leftist Latin American Christians, liberal freedoms, and supposed antifamily values. In the 1980s, he supported “contra” terrorist attacks against liberals and leftist civilians in Nicaragua. During his tenure with Robert Knight at the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, LaBarbera actively promoted the exgay movement — for example, offering favors to Jerry Falwell and his handpicked exgay spokesman, Michael Johnston, at a forum with Soulforce that I attended in 1999. LaBarbera’s writing enjoys support from both the Exodus Media Blog and the Exodus national office.
LaBarbera is a conservative, to be sure, but I thought surely (surely!) his politics are a far cry from what the Southern Poverty Law Center calls the most extreme political party in the United States: The Constitution Party.
According to the SPLC, the Constitution Party (formerly the U.S. Taxpayers Party) seeks to make the Old Testament the law of the land. It seeks to undo every constitutional amendment since 1913 — including women’s right to vote. It seeks to re-legalize assault weapons for undisclosed purposes, and it flirts with advocates for the execution of adulterers and homosexuals.
In 2004, Constitution Party presidential candidate Michael Peroutka described the Republican Party as playing “Gomorrah” to the Democratic Party’s “slightly more evil Sodom.”
With 340,000 registered voters, the party is among the nation’s largest third parties. It draws its support from fundamentalists and neo-Confederates. It traces its origins to racist 1968 presidential candidate George Wallace.
But racism pervades the Party’s present as well as its past.
“We’re not one nation under God — we’re one nation under God’s wrath,” said John Lofton, a former GOP operative who’s now earning $800 a week running Peroutka for President’s press operations. His sentiment was seconded by Michael Hill, president of the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South.
SPLC research cites numerous anti-black and anti-Hispanic racists among the Party’s recent candidates and guest speakers. Among the candidates:
- Utah’s Jack Gray, who presents himself as a member of David Duke’s white supremacist hate group, the European American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO)
- Mississippi’s John Thomas Cripps, a long-time member of the white-supremacist hate group, League of the South
But racism is just one of several themes of the Party.
Religious self-pride is another theme. The SPLC points to the Party’s affection for Oregon antigay activist Lon Mabon, who has repeatedly violated Oregon state laws and court rulings. Mabon told a Party audience that they — like Mabon — are above the law, and worthy of determining who qualifies for public office:
“I hear the voice of God saying that the [government] must surrender to the requirements of His Holiness,” Mabon has written. “This means that the Governor, U.S. Senators, Representatives and all elected officials should be allowed into office only after they have proved to the Citizens … that they are indeed obedient to the Will and Holiness of God.”
One hopes that there are limits to voters’ attraction to religious self-righteousness and racial and sexual blame-games. At least the SPLC hopes so: It says the Constitution Party is so stridently antifamily and fanatical that voters would find the party morally repugnant if they peered beneath the Party’s pro-family, pro-faith facade:
How many potential voters, after all, will punch their ballots for a party that calls for outlawing abortion even in cases of rape or incest, withdrawing from the United Nations, overturning every Constitutional amendment passed since 1913 (which would include the amendments authorizing the federal income tax and the right of women to vote), halting all immigration, abolishing the income tax and re-legalizing assault weapons?
Those planks only begin to tell the story. In its brief history, the Constitution Party has flirted egregiously with some of the most extreme elements of the antigovernment militia movement and of Christian Reconstruction, a radical theology that calls for imposing Old Testament laws — stoning to death adulterers and homosexuals, to name just two.
According to the SPLC, the Constitution Party’s public-policy immoralities are matched by the private moral wrongs of its leaders:
Peroutka’s wholesome appeal as “the home-school candidate” was undercut by a scathing profile this spring in Baltimore City Paper. Though Peroutka likes to preach family responsibility and criticize state-funded programs for kids (often proclaiming in campaign speeches, “The state has no children!”), reporter Van Smith discovered that the candidate had disowned two teenage stepdaughters who accused him of abuse, turning them over to the state of Maryland and rebuffing their subsequent attempts to reconcile with their mother.
Peroutka’s public record also includes a conviction for driving with an illegally high concentration of alcohol in his system in 1991, and questions have been raised about his sudden rise to wealth. “Just a few years ago,” Smith says, “the Peroutkas were living in cul-de-sac townhouse developments, and suddenly they’re in this huge new house” valued at well over half a million dollars.
Peroutka’s response to City Paper’s financial questions was pious but vague: “I am thankful to God from whom all blessings flow.”
At his acceptance speech in Valley Forge, Pa., Peroutka said, “What kind of country sends sodomites to fight in an unconstitutional, undeclared war?” He was greeted mostly with polite applause, according to the SPLC.
The party’s vice presidential nominee, Chuck Baldwin, was (again according to SPLC) identified in a 1995 newspaper article as an active member of the Escambia County Militia. (“Jesus never preached disarmament,” he explained.)
Knowing all that, it was mighty surprising to discover today that Peter LaBarbera’s Illinois Family Institute is promoting the Constitution Party’s 2006 Illinois convention.
Was this oversized, full-page calendar item on the IFI web site an isolated oversight? Perhaps not: Looking a bit further, I discovered that, in a letter dated last November, LaBarbera promoted the Constitution Party’s candidate for Illinois governor. LaBarbera said:
Do we really need the leaders of both major parties to support such causes? Pro-family and pro-life voters would be utterly dejected at the prospect of having to choose between two committed social liberals (Topinka and Gov. Blagojevich) next November. Many, like me, would sit it out or perhaps vote for a third party candidate. (There is a conservative third-party candidate for governor, Randy Stufflebeam of the Constitution Party.)
A Google search finds 121 web sites (mostly conservative) that, to varying degrees, perceive connections or ideological affinities between Peter LaBarbera and the Constitution Party.
One wonders whether the national “pro-family” movement and Exodus are even slightly disturbed by the Illinois Family Institute’s support for racism, vote-less women, militia activity, death threats against homosexuals, and fundamentalists who consider themselves above the law.
Disturbed enough, perhaps, to repudiate these immoralities in public?
Or would a repudiation of the Constitution Party’s extremist “absolutes” force the pro-family movement to acknowledge its own moral relativism?
Mike,
disturbing but not surprising connection.
What I found amusing is that on the page advertising the Constitution Party’s convention was a picture of Republican Abraham Lincoln (who may, himself, have had sexual relationships with men).
Every six months or so, the media tends to trot out Christian Exodus, a group that believes it will have most Christians move to a state and take it over (ignoring everything about the 14th Amendment). They have a fairly strict belief in how the states should be run on moral issues. The leader has not even made the move yet (still living in California). Anyhow, they have very few members right now, but they talk it up like they have tons. I investigated some things about this group and found that the leadership are all members of the Constitution Party. I doubt the Constitution Party will have any real traction in the US.
Timothy said:
What I found amusing is that on the page advertising the Constitution Party’s convention was a picture of Republican Abraham Lincoln (who may, himself, have had sexual relationships with men).
That picture is part of the site and on every page, so I don’t think there is any connection there. It would indeed be ironic if so; if you look closely at the Constitution Party, I think you will find much of it would be foreign to Lincoln. Not because of any supposed homosexual relationships in Lincoln’s life – I find the evidence in support of that rather thin (though it makes little difference to me either way, as long as we base that conclusion on fact) – but because he considered preservation of the Union imperative while Constitutionalists emphasize, in some cases even encourage, the possibility of succession.
It appears to me that the Constitution Party is the sort that most people left of center are talking about when they call someone a conservative. Unfortunately, as with most scatter shot comments, people like me or Timothy (or who knows how many others) get hit as well. These people are the real deal, and I find them more than a little bit creepy.
David
“That picture is part of the site and on every page, so I don’t think there is any connection there.”
I’m sure it was not deliberate linkage on their part. However it still is ironic. These are people who post a picture of a man without even considering that he and his ideologies were far from those they espouse.
It’s like the folks who march on Dr. King’s birthday to “protect the family” and denounce gay people without listening to his wife and closest advisors saying that he opposed discrimination against gay people.
Or those claiming that our “founding fathers” were strong Christian men, not realizing that many of the more familiar names were Deists, and many of those who were Christian held religous beliefs that most modern Christians would find heretical.
Irony is about the only endearing quality of ignorance.
p.s. David, I read Tripp’s book on Lincoln. While I did not find it completely convincing, I did find it compelling. Perhaps some long-hidden evidence will someday be found to determine the matter for once and for all, but for now it’s an open question.
I think we naturally assume that if Lincoln was carrying on a relationship with someone in the White House, that the nation’s capital would be scandalized. And thus, overwhelming evidence must be needed before we believe it. But remember this was the president who followed James Buchanan whom pretty much everyone knows was probably gay. Certainly the residents of DC thought so at the time – but no one thought it relevant.
Also, the objections I’ve read to Tripp’s work all seemed amazingly ignorant about sexual orientation. They seemed to come across like the people who say “Ennis and Jack weren’t really gay, they both married” or “Ennis wouldn’t have been gay except Jack seduced him”. I’m going by memory here, but I think one of the detractors said “most of Lincoln’s letters to Joshua Speed had no reference to longing and were mundane and about legal matters”. To which I thought, what planet does this guy live on?
While I’m not convinced by Tripp, I find his positions to be slightly more credible than his detractors.
Timothy said:
While I’m not convinced by Tripp, I find his positions to be slightly more credible than his detractors.
I guess we can agree to disagree on that one. I found Tripp to be quite loose with the facts and guilty of applying current sexual context to things of a different era in a way that distorted their meaning. Truthfully, I just don’t find it important enough to care much one way or the other about it, and I’m not above questioning the motives of one who would write an entire book on such scant information. Interesting to speculate I suppose, but I wouldn’t want to find myself in the position of having to prove he was.
David
Hey I say this is a great thing for GLBT people because the more these so-called pro-family religious nuts align themselves with violent religious extremists the more apt they are to be ignored and rejected by the general American population.
I hope more of this comes up and that the mainstream media gets a hold of this. I hope Air America Radio also brings it to the attention of their listeners as well.
As someone who follows LaBarbera’s and IFI’s escapades rather closely, this is not surprising. Outside of ultra-conservative predominately white conservative christian groups, IFI has little relevance.
Their campaign to place an advisory referendum banning same-sex marriage in Illinois is foundering due to their inability to gather enough signatures.
They’ve also alienated the front runner for the GOP nomination for governor (she’s generally pro-gay).
I can’t help but wonder if LaBarbera wasn’t banished by FRC and CWFA due to a tendency to come out with some rather extreme rhetoric (even by their standards).
David,
We’ll just have agree to disagree on who seems more credible. Unless the secret diaries of Joshua Speed that Larry Kramer claims to have read are ever validated and made public, we’re likely to never really know one way or the other.
IFI Calls for Reinstatement of Federal Ban on HIV-Infected Travelers after Daley Helps Lift HIV Ban for Chicago ‘Gay Games’ in JulyEvidence is clear: the “extra-curricular” activities surrounding the “Gay Games” present a real health hazard to those involved and the surrounding community02/28/2006
Dakota Voice–snip–Illinois Family Institute, which is associated with Focus on the Family, is dedicated to protecting marriage, family and the sanctity of life in the Land of Lincoln. IFI is proudly affiliated with Protect Marriage Illinois, which is seeking to place a referendum on the Illinois ballot in November defining marriage as between one man and one woman. All inquiries can be sent to info@illinoisfamily.org or call 630-790-8370.
Autumn at February 28, 2006 05:45 PM
Can’t you just feel the love oozing out of the pores of those IFI people?
What? You mean that’s not love?
The Family Research Council has joined LaBarbera — this time by asking the public to call the White House in protest.
But FRC dances around the precise intent of these calls — which is to require HIV testing of every U.S. visitor, and to treat HIV-positive individuals like lepers.