Need a little cheese with your whine, Tony? Or perhaps you should try looking in the mirror before you start going on national conservative talk television to point your little claws at the Southern Poverty Law Center for the unhinged attack by a dude with Chick-Fil-A in his backpack.
I've said before and I'll say again that walking into anywhere and opening fire is despicable, no matter what the reason and no matter who the intended target. But this little dive into finger-pointing is downright dangerous.
DOOCY: But you say that the Southern Poverty Law Center which has referred to your group as a hate group could somehow have been, what? The spark?
PERKINS: Steve, I don't think there's any question about it, that two years ago when they started labeling Christian organizations as hate groups that stand for traditional marriage and orthodox Christianity that, that sparked it.
And the man came in not only with 50 rounds of ammunition but 15 ChickFilA sandwiches. Of course we know the controversy that surrounded that in the last couple of weeks.
It's also known that he had a couple of other groups listed on a list that -- I guess his hit list -- and at least one of them, I don't know about the third but the other -- one of the other two was listed on the list that the Southern Poverty Law Center puts out.
So clearly they are inciting this environment of hostility toward religious organizations. And it's dangerous. We've now seen it's gone beyond the rhetoric and passing of words to actually almost taking the lives of individuals.
I have a few questions for Tony Perkins.
Would he have said the same thing about, say, Operation Rescue after Dr. Tiller was murdered by someone acting on their rhetoric?
How about Joseph Ray Stack crashing his airplane into the IRS offices in Texas as an anti-government gesture? Who is responsible for that "going beyond the rhetoric?"
Was Tony Perkins concerned about religious liberty when six people were actually murdered at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin?
To be clear here, when Perkins gives earnest testimony to Fox viewers about going beyond rhetoric, and the degree of hostility toward religious organizations, he is not really concerned with all religions. He is concerned with Christian organizations alone. He would not have uttered those words about an environment of hostility toward Muslim organizations, nor did Fox News concern troll when the mosque was shot at a couple of weeks ago. I didn't see them hosting the spokesman for CAIR to discuss his concern about Rep. Joe Walsh's remarks. Eight mosque attacks over an 11-day period couldn't be the result of Michele Bachmann's irresponsible remarks could it?
Where is Fox & Friends and Tony Perkins' concern for the inflammatory rhetoric of Dave Mustaine, Hank Williams, Jr. and Ted Nugent?
Crickets.
The dangerous rhetoric actually comes from Tony Perkins, who places not only the blame but actually the accusation of incitement to violence on the SPLC without regard to the danger he causes employees of that place. The dangerous rhetoric comes from people like Michele Bachmann and Joe Walsh, targeting Muslims because their religion is different.
I've written at least five separate posts on five separate efforts in recent weeks by the right wing loonies to not just "other" President Obama, but to shout out to the Aryan Nations and militias to ready themselves for "battle". These are intended to stoke up an otherwise unmotivated right wing base for their candidate, but just as they have in the past, they will also endanger the President, Secret Service, and civilians' lives on the campaign trail because they are intended to incite them to go beyond the rhetoric and act.
These people are covered in the blood of actual dead people who they incited. Perkins knows it, too.
