Liberty Counsel is a hate group!!

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COMMENTS: 
*  These religious groups are a danger to America. They have zero respect for the US Constitution
*  Staver: "There’s not a hateful bone in my body”.   These pseudo-Christians sure don't care much for that pesky "Thou Shalt Not Lie" commandment, do they?
*  The leader of one cult met with the idol of another....and we're surprised why? This Pope has displayed a basic level of humanity that has not been readily associated with the church of late. I like Francis as a person, but as a religious leader he is still the Pope and it's best not to forget that he is the leader of an institution that has violently persecuted homosexuals for centuries.
*  I commend Terrence McCoy for spelling out that the Southern Poverty Law Center has determined that the Liberty Council is a hate group. Any story that refers to this organization or to Staver as its spokesman should clearly point that fact out.
*  Shame you weren't around when supporters of Jim Crow needed you. Or clerks in Virginia who didn't want to issue marriage licenses to interracial couples. Or store owners who didn't want to have to serve Jews, Japanese, or Catholics. Funny how you confuse Christians having to abide by the same laws as the rest of us as "tyranny." I mean, tyranny and rule of law are pretty easy to confuse. I suggest taking a basic course on logical reasoning, American history, civics, and maybe an introductory course on the American legal system.
*  Just like TV televangelists the Liberty Council is feeding off the donations of people who can least afford it. Anything for a buck.
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The controversial group at the center of the Pope Francis-Kim Davis meeting
By Terrence McCoy, September 30, 2015

In the summer of 2000, Ken Sivulich was three years into his new job as the Jacksonville, Fla., library director when he had a fun idea. The fourth installment of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series had just hit the shelves, and the library had ordered scores of the book to meet demand. As a way to encourage kids to read, the library handed out certificates to those who had read the book, congratulating them on completing the “Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.”

A harmless gimmick, he thought. Good for a chuckle.

One little-known group based two hours south in Orlando wasn’t laughing. The certificate seemed to praise the dark arts and, perhaps, disturbed the delicate equilibrium between church and state. “Witchcraft is a religion, and the certificate of witchcraft endorsed a particular religion is violation of the First Amendment establishment clause,” Mathew Staver, president of Liberty Counsel, then told the Florida Times-Union.

At the time, Sivulich hadn’t heard of either Staver or Liberty Counsel, which was threatening to sue the library. But over the next 15 years, the group would rise from relative obscurity and become one of the nation’s most prominent Christian legal groups on the strength of repeatedly staking out such tendentious positions on divisive issues. The most recent example of this formula — which has made the nonprofit anathema among gay rights advocates, but flooded its coffers with millions of dollars worth of donations — is Kim Davis. The legal organization represents the Kentucky clerk who was jailed last month for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and has since become the latest flashpoint in the long struggle over gay marriage.

When news broke Tuesday night that she had met with Pope Francis, it was Liberty Counsel that bore the news. “He held out his hand and she clasped his hands and held them,” Staver, who did not attend the meeting, said earlier today. He said the pope “spoke English the entire time” and that Davis said “she would pray for him. She asked the pope to pray for her, and he said he would pray.”

The news and its partnership with Davis has thrust the organization into its most visible perch to date, bringing the Liberty Counsel within proximity of a global celebrity on the most publicized trip of his papacy. “I am fully aware of the timing,” Staver said, adding later, “I understand it’s a huge event.”

But among critics, the mounting prominence of Liberty Counsel has resurrected the ghosts of past battles in which they say the group veered from religious activism to demagoguery and defamatory rhetoric against gays. This is a group that has advocated gay conversion therapy. It’s a group that fears opening up the Boy Scouts to gay scout leaders has forged a “playground for pedophiles.” A group led by a man who links promiscuity with homosexuality. “Given these staggering statistics of sexual promiscuity, the number of diseases found predominantly (and in some instances, exclusively) among practitioners comes as no surprise,” Staver wrote in his 2004 book, “Same Sex Marriage: Putting Every Household at Risk.”

“What they’re saying isn’t just unpleasant matters of opinion,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow of the Southern Law Poverty Center, which in 2010 designated Liberty Counsel a “hate group.” “These are falsehoods, and have the effect of defaming a very large group of people which has the opportunity to subject them to violence. It gives people permission to believe that gay people are insidious characters who deserve to face violence.”

Staver called such statements “ridiculous claims. I will say that the [Southern Law Poverty Center] is reckless in its classification of different people as haters or hate groups. We hate no one. It would be contrary to my faith to hate anyone. There would be no reason to hate anyone. There’s not a hateful bone in my body.”

The group, which launched in 1989 and had ties to the late televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr., has long straddled the fault lines dividing American society on gay rights, endearing it to some and riling others. But now, amid historic support for gay marriage, Liberty Counsel also represents how such groups are trying to reframe the debate on terms more sympathetic to their cause. It’s no longer about marriage equality. It’s about religious freedom.

“They’re using Davis as a way to say we don’t care about gay marriage,” said Daniel Bennett, assistant professor of political science at Eastern Kentucky University. “We care about religious freedom. They’ve been taking positions and sticking with positions that have fallen out of favor with public opinion.”

And because of that, the positions Liberty Counsel has long advocated strike critics as all the more incendiary. Take one initiative in the early 2000s, said Orlando attorney Mary Meeks. The city had proposed a ban on discrimination on the basis on sexual orientation. And in response, she said, Staver declared all-out war.

“Staver was leading the thundering charge in opposition to that,” she recalled. “They were saying all kinds of terrible things about gay people, which is what they do for a living. … They exploit false and malicious propaganda about gay people. All the myths that gay people are pedophiles and suffer from high rates of mental illnesses and drug abuse — scare tactics.”

The group, which Bennett called “more extreme than other Christian legal groups,” then moved onto the gay marriage debate roiling California. There, according to Tobin Grant, a Southern Illinois University political scientist, it staked out a more ideological position than the Alliance Defending Freedom, which was litigating the case. “Liberty Counsel didn’t like Proposition 8 because it didn’t go far enough,” he said.

But in the months following the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay marriage in June, the group has recalibrated its mission as one of religious freedom. And in Kim Davis, it has found a champion of this nascent frontier in a long struggle over gay marriage. As well as a powerful ally in Pope Francis.

“He had broad messages and broad strokes,” Staver said. “The fact that he met with … Kim Davis was very consistent with the message of religious freedom and marriage.”
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