Today’s NY Times has a story about new-ish political blogs already getting a jump-start on the 2012 presidential elections. Turns out Tim Pawlenty, the conservative governor of Minnesota, has some dude trailing him daily with a Flip cam. It’s likely he’ll run in 2012 (or, well, run later this year for 2012, the way these things go).A recent New Hampshire straw poll has him beating Sarah Palin as a top presidential candidate.
I’d never heard of the guy until yesterday, when I read that anti-gay Christian organization Family Research Council was named a “hate group” in December by the Southern Poverty Law Center. From the SLPC’s report:
Headed since 2003 by former Louisiana State Rep. Tony Perkins, the FRC has been a font of anti-gay propaganda throughout its history. It relies on the work of Robert Knight […] along with that of FRC senior research fellows Tim Dailey (hired in 1999) and Peter Sprigg (2001). Both Dailey and Sprigg have pushed false accusations linking gay men to pedophilia: Sprigg has written that most men who engage in same-sex child molestation “identify themselves as homosexual or bisexual,” and Dailey and Sprigg devoted an entire chapter of their 2004 book Getting It Straight to similar material. The men claimed that “homosexuals are overrepresented in child sex offenses” and similarly asserted that “homosexuals are attracted in inordinate numbers to boys.”
Angry at being called out as a “hate group” and not as an organization “advancing faith, family, and freedom,” the FRC published an ad which listed dozens of U.S. elected officials who supported the work they did to publish fabricated pseudo-science about gay people.
Tim Pawlenty was one of three governors who pledged support. (The others were Huckabee and Jindal.)
Pawlenty, it goes without saying, is against marriage equality for same-sex couples (as, still, is our current president). But did you know he’d also repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”?
Not that any of this is a surprise. Anti-gay GOP candidates? Pawlenty, though, seems to be one of the most fervent. We’ll see, if he does run, whether his anti-gay rhetoric amps up or gets toned down. What does the Tea Party want?