We all know that the Chick-fil-A last month was public relations nightmare, with their donations to the SPLC-defined “hate group” the Family Research Council being the cherry on the scandal.

The Family Research Council is one of those groups that lobby Washington to force “Judeo-Christian” values down our throats via legislation. And gets pissed off when people criticize them, because they don’t understand the First Amendment.

AMERICAblog has an excellent post about how terrible the FRC really is:

Let me give you a made-up example of a quote about gays to who you how [sic] the family research council did this.

“This study looked at 45 gay men, and 35 lesbians.  It was clear from the subjects that gay men and lesbians face greater societal pressures in their day to day lives… which makes gays and lesbians much more likely to rip the heads off small bunnies.”

Wow, rip the heads off small bunnies – that’s pretty bad.  But hey, it’s a real study in a real journal, so it has to be true.  Except of course that the real quote from the actual study ends at the ellipse, while the FRC added its own opinion after the ellipse, while “forgetting” to put the end quote, so it looks like the FRC’s opinion is part of the official quote from the reputable study.

Gosh, I wonder how that happened?

It went on and on like this, through hundreds of footnotes.  I went through the original research of the various studies they cited and found that the study reached no such conclusion like the FRC claimed it did.  And on and on and on.

These are not honest people simply expressing a contrarian view of politics, like Democrats and Republicans do every day in Washington.

Tony Perkins, FRC’s head, got on TV a few months ago to debate whether gay parents were as good as straight parents.  Perkins said “no,” and he had the study to prove it.  Perkins explained how studies have proven that kids need a mom and a dad.  What Perkins didn’t bother telling you was that those studies compared kids with a mom and a dad to kids with a single parent.  The studies never looked at the relative merits of gay parents.  Gay parents might have been just as good, or heck, even better than straight parents.  The study didn’t even look at it.  But Perkins cited the study as proof that straight parents were better than gay parents, when the study had nothing to do with it.

And again, Dana, if you actually go through the FRC’s “research,” you will find this kind of “mistake” happening again and again.  It happens so often, it’s happened for twenty years now that I’ve been tracking them, that you come to realize that lying for the Family Research Council isn’t a flaw, it’s a feature.

I don’t really have strong opinions about the shooting and whether it should be called a “hate crime” or not, since I’m not for criminalizing reasons behind intent. But if FRC isn’t classified as a hate group, then I don’t know what should be.