The chairman of the New York St. Patrick’s Day parade used his leadership position this week to compare gay Irish Americans to the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis in a sloppy effort to cast gay Irish Americans as enemies of the Irish community. Even so, the chairman adopted some of the tactics of those extremist groups to affirm discrimination and ostracism against gay Irish Americans.

Despite this well-publicized incident, the Family Research Council today silently excused the chairman’s remarks with a blanket defense of the parade and a repudiation of “the homosexual ‘free-speech’ agenda.”

FRC contrasted gay Irish requests for inclusion with the assertion of one gay activist, NGLTF’s Matt Foreman, about exgays. The NGLTF opposes an upcoming speech by Exodus president Alan Chambers at the neo-Reconstructionist Center for Reclaiming America. Based solely on the views of one small and left-leaning gay rights organization, FRC’s Tony Perkins asserted that all gay Americans are opposed to free speech except when it suits their interests. Perkins also neglected to explain why Foreman might be skeptical of one particular exgay activist’s speech to a Christian Patriot group that has supported the imprisonment of homosexuals under sodomy laws.

Are we to believe that, unlike the leftist NGLTF, Perkins supports free speech for all — including gays, exgays and the former exgays who say they’ve been misled by Alan Chambers and other Exodus board members?

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