Tony Perkins

"Those who understand the homosexual community — the activists — they’re very aggressive, they’re – everything they accuse us of they are in triplicate. They’re intolerant, they’re hateful, vile, they’re spiteful. .... To me, that is the height of hatred, to be silent when we know there are individuals that are engaged in activity, behavior, and an agenda that will destroy them and our nation."

- Perkins speaking to the Oak Initiative Summit, April 2011. Anthony Richard "Tony" Perkins (born March 20, 1963) is president of the Family Research Council, a Christian conservative policy and lobbying organization based in Washington, D.C. Perkins, a Southern Baptist layman, was previously a police officer and television reporter, served two terms as a Republican member of the Louisiana House of Representatives and unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate in 2002. On May 14 2018, he was appointed to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

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On May 17, 2001, Perkins gave a speech to the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white supremacist group that has described black people as a "retrograde species of humanity". Perkins claimed not to know the group's ideology at the time, but it had been widely publicized in Louisiana and the nation, just two years earlier. In an April 26, 2005, article in The Nation, reporter Max Blumenthal revealed that in 1996 while managing the unsuccessful U. S. Senate campaign of Woody Jenkins, Perkins "paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list." Despite Perkins' denials the document authorizing the payment carried Perkins' signature. The Duke incident surfaced again in the local press in 2002, when Perkins ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate.

In 2007, Perkins opposed the first ever Hindu prayer before the United States Senate saying that "There is no historic connection between America and the polytheistic creed of the Hindu faith." He also opposed a US Marines yoga and meditation program for PTSD prevention terming the Hindu and Buddhist practices as "goofy".

In 2010, the Family Research Council—under Perkins' leadership—was classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) which characterized the group as "a fount of anti-gay propaganda". Perkins dismissed the hate group designation as a political attack on the FRC by a "liberal organization" and as part of "the left's smear campaign of conservatives". On December 15, 2010, the FRC ran an open letter advertisement in two Washington, D.C. newspapers disputing the SPLC's action. The letter included the signatures of social conservative politicians including twenty members of the House of Representatives (including then soon-to-be Speaker John Boehner), three U.S. senators, four state governors, and one state attorney general.

In spring 2013, Perkins urged conservatives nationwide to withhold political contributions to the national Republican Party until the leadership "grows a backbone" and halts support for so many of the Democratic legislative initiatives.

Perkins has also made statements critical of Islam. In September 2010, Perkins claimed that "the ultimate evil has been committed" when Muslims interpret the Quran in its literal context, that Islam "tears at the fabric of democracy," and that World history classes dishonestly portray Islam in a positive light by providing an "airbrushed" portrait of the religion itself.

In 2015, Perkins affirmed the debate over Obama's birth certificate as "legitimate", remarking that it "makes sense" to conclude that Obama was a Muslim.

In 2017, Perkins was accused of covering up a 2015 sexual assault by Wesley Goodman, a political candidate the Council for National Policy raised money for.

In 2018, Perkins was criticized for defending Donald Trump's behavior, saying he should be given a "Mulligan"