Family Research Council celebrates Pride Month by spreading vile misinformation and hate about the LGBTQ community

FRC’s Peter Sprigg suggested that mental illness among some LGBTQ people is evidence that they are not “natural,” said HIV is “a direct result” of gay sex, and promoted the debunked practice of conversion therapy

Special Programs LGBTQ

Written by Alex Paterson

Published


Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

Extreme anti-LBGTQ group Family Research Council regularly traffics in extreme language, but it recently published a post by Peter Sprigg about LGBTQ Pride Month, which was particularly vile even by its own standards. In the blog, Sprigg said gay men should not be proud because HIV is “a direct result of that sexual behavior” and that mental illness in the LGBTQ community is evidence its members are not “natural.”



Sprigg, a senior fellow at FRC, has called for homosexuality to be criminalized and has said, “I would much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them into the United States because we believe that homosexuality is destructive to society.” Sprigg has pushed his anti-LGBTQ views internationally at the global summit of World Congress of Families (WCF), where he “argued that transgender identity is unscientific,” according to Right Wing Watch. The WCF is an international coalition of anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ groups led by former National Organization for Marriage President Brian Brown, and it promotes extreme right-wing policies around the world under the guise of protecting the “natural family.”

Domestically, Sprigg has given public comment at a committee meeting urging the Food and Drug Administration’s to uphold its policy banning men who have sex with men from donating blood, advocated to the Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee against nondiscrimination protections for transgender people, and testified before state legislatures in Vermont, Hawaii, and New Hampshire against protections for LBGTQ youth from conversion therapy. Moreover, Sprigg’s boss, FRC President Tony Perkins, was appointed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to be a commissioner of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Sprigg also writes articles spreading anti-LGBTQ misinformation across several right-wing platforms, including The Daily Signal, Washington Examiner, and The Christian Post. Right-wing and evangelical media, in turn, quote Sprigg as an expert on conversion therapy and the health needs of transgender people even though he is not a medical professional.



In an article posted on June 11, Sprigg railed against the LGBTQ community under the deceitfully reasoned headline “Should Christians Recognize ‘LGBT Pride?’” Anti-LGBTQ organizations often try to pit religious rights against LGBTQ equality in a fallacious “God vs. Gay” dichotomy, though the majority of religious groups think homosexuality “should be accepted,” according to Pew Research. Here are some of the worst anti-LGBTQ comments that Sprigg pushed in the FRC blog post:

  • “The high rates of mental illness that accompany such feelings is strong evidence against the idea that homosexual and transgender feelings are ‘natural.’”

  • "Men who have sex with men, in particular, have high rates of HIV infection and other sexually transmitted diseases as a direct result of that sexual behavior—so is it something to be ‘proud’ of?”

  • “To accept ‘LGBT Pride’ is to accept the assertion that these feelings are a normal and natural variant of human sexuality.”

  • “Some individuals who identify as transgender ask surgeons to mutilate or remove otherwise healthy body parts—often with serious long-term consequences—in order to make their bodies resemble more closely their desired sex. Is this something to be proud of?”

  • "To endorse ‘LGBT Pride’ is to endorse all three—to affirm that LGBT feelings are normal and natural (which is untrue), that LGBT behaviors are harmless or even admirable (also untrue), and that their LGBT ‘identity’ is innate (untrue as well).”

  • "Homosexual activists and their allies in the states have even been invading the privacy of the relationship between mental health providers and their clients, by passing laws to prohibit sexual orientation change efforts, or SOCE (which critics refer to as ‘conversion therapy’) with minors.”

  • “The former tennis star and self-identified lesbian Martina Navratilova said, ‘Catholic clergy has been a lot more dangerous to kids than LGBT’ (apparently without irony, since there is reason to believe that most of the Catholic priests who have molested children are themselves homosexual).”