Life

Huckabee defends group linked to anti-gay human rights violations

Huckabee defends group linked to anti-gay human rights violations
Mike Huckabee
Mike Huckabee AP

Fox News host Mike Huckabee joined 79 other conservatives in signing a letter blasting “sexual radicals” for their efforts to scuttle a planned conference of the World Congress of Families (WCF), a group notorious for stoking homophobia and promoting harsh anti-gay laws internationally.

On August 30, the Rockford, IL-based WCF plans to hold a “Life, Family, and Freedom Conference” in Melbourne, Australia. Protests have led to three changes of venue for the conference, which prominent members of Australia’s governing party are slated to attend.

Equality Matters reports the WCF has responded to those protests with a letter signed by 80 social conservatives, including Huckabee. Accusing “sexual radicals” of waging a “smear campaign,” the letter charges that opponents of the conference aim to “transform society into something unrecognizable to generations past”:

Sexual radicals have launched a smear campaign to discredit the Melbourne conference, which misrepresents the international pro-family movement and the positions of the World Congress of Families.

[…]

The goal of sexual radicals is to deconstruct marriage and marginalize the family, and thus to transform society into something unrecognizable to generations past. Like all social experiments that attempt to create a “new man,” these are doomed to failure.

Founded after a 1995 meeting between Illinois anti-gay activist Allan Carlson and two Russian sociologists, the WCF is a self-proclaimed “alliance of orthodox believers, based on their commitment to Judeo-Christian values and the natural family.”

Labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and active in several nations across five continents, the World Congress of Families has organized large international “pro-family” conventions that bring together the most fringe activists engaged in anti-LGBT extremism since 1997.

Earlier this week, the Human Rights Campaign released a new report examining WCF’s role in promoting and coordinating the exportation of anti-LGBT bigotry, ideology, and legislation abroad.

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