Ken Blackwell -- who cited “the attack on ... natural marriage” as a reason for the May 23 mass murder in Isla Vista, California -- has longstanding ties to the National Rifle Association.

Blackwell, who is also a senior fellow at anti-gay hate group Family Research Council, was flagged by People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch linking gay marriage to the killing spree that left six dead. From FRC's radio show:

BLACKWELL: When you see there's a crumbling of the moral foundation of the country, you see the attack on the -- on natural marriage and the family that has been a part of the, not only the moral foundation and the upbringing of our children but the teaching of sexual roles and the development of human sexuality in our culture. When these fundamental institutions are attacked and destroyed and weakened and abandoned, you get what we are now seeing and that is a flood of these disturbed people in our society that are causing great, great pain. And as opposed to dealing with the foundational problems, we look for ways of blaming the Second Amendment, or blaming knives or blaming cars when they are used. At the end of the day, you have just underscored the problem. This is a convenient way of avoiding talking about what's at the root cause.

According to his biography at FRC, Blackwell sits on the NRA's public affairs committee and has served on the group's urban affairs committee. He has also been a member of the NRA's board of directors, and was up for reelection this year. (The NRA has not yet publicly released information about the outcome of the 2014 board elections.) Blackwell is a fixture at the NRA's annual meetings, and spoke at the meeting's leadership forums in 2011 and 2012.

Blackwell has long used his column at the Patriot Post to push outlandish conspiracy theories and make hateful claims about LGBT people. A few lowlights:

• In a 2009 column, Blackwell compared same-sex marriage to incest. He also bizarrely suggested that transgender and bisexual individuals would use same-sex marriage laws to demand participation in polygamous marriages: “Remember, we've all been schooled in that LGBT formulation. That means Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered. The advocates of counterfeiting marriage cannot leave out their B and T. So, what will that mean? How can they deny 'marriage equality' to a bisexual person who wants to marry two significant others? Or what about a person who has attempted through surgery and drugs to change his sex? Should such a person, if married, be denied the right to marry another person? If love and commitment make a marriage, why cannot brothers and sisters marry? Or fathers and daughters? What the District [of Columbia] Council has done is to open the door to polygamy, to incest.”
• Also in 2009 Blackwell warned that alarmism over climate change could lead to forced abortions in the United States similar to those caused by China's one child policy and suggested that the U.S. could bury rather than incinerate “the bodies of unborn children who have been aborted under Mr. Obama's health care takeover” as “a small contribution to lowering temperatures.”
• In a 2010 column, Blackwell called Attorney General Eric Holder a “dhimmicrat,” which he defined as “a person who, while not Muslim himself, nonetheless clears the path for shariah law to be adopted and incorporated into otherwise free nations.”
• Blackwell wrote in 2010 that ending the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy could cause a “health crisis into the ranks of our volunteer military” because of the “Gay Men's Health Crisis.” He also bizarrely posited that the Obama administration would order the military “to recruit gays by quota” and wondered “if sufficient new recruits cannot be attracted to the Obama military, will this administration bring back the draft?”

Blackwell is also known for a disastrous 2006 Senate run where he claimed that his Democratic opponent Ted Strickland was a supporter of the North American Man/Boy Love Association.