GOP House Chairman Quietly Invites Hate Group Leader to Testify against Gay Marriage

Tea party Republicans won the House last year by promising to focus on the economy and “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” But in the four months or so that they have controlled the House, the GOP has focused instead on curtailing women’s rights; defunding programs that help seniors, children and the poor; and going after public broadcasting.

Now the tea party has added the fight against gay civil rights to its agenda.

Earlier this week, the Homophobe Caucus in the House quietly scheduled a hearing on same-sex marriage which it gave the Newspeak title, “Defending Marriage.” The star witness at the hearing will be Maggie Gallagher, leader of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). Late last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center officially added NOM to its list of domestic hate groups, a longstanding list that also includes the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nation.

NOM made headlines last week when one of its key activists, Louis Marinelli, defected by coming out in favor of marriage rights for gays.

The hearing before the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, which was announced without fanfare earlier this week, has been ignored by the “liberal” mainstream media. The silence on cable and in the press stands in stark contrast to the howls of criticism six weeks ago when GOP Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King held anti-Muslim hearings, which were denounced as “McCarthyism.”

Other witnesses who have been called to testify include Edward Whelan, a lawyer and political operative associated with right-wing extremism and judicial activism, and Carlos Ball, a law professor at Rutgers School of Law, who is gay.

The chairman of the subcommittee is tea-party Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., one of the most virulent homophobes in Congress. In the 1980s, Franks founded the Arizona Family Research Institute, which was associated with Focus on the Family, one of the best-known national nonprofits that focuses on suppressing and restricting gay civil rights. Franks’ group subsequently changed its name to the Center for Arizona Policy (CAP).

Last month, Franks joined former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich and others in calling for the impeachment of Pres. Obama after the administration announced it would no longer seek to defend the constitutionality of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). He has also called the president “an enemy of humanity” and is a proud advocate of birtherism.

The hearing is co-sponsored by tea party leader Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., who made headlines last week by leading the charge to shut down the federal government over funding for Planned Parenthood and other women’s health clinics. Pence, who is retiring from Congress next year and may run for governor of Indiana, is associated with his state’s affiliate of Focus on the Family. Last fall, Pence trounced Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin and other better known GOP presidential wanna-bes in the straw poll at the Values Voter Summit, a confab of right-wing religious extremists held in Washington, D.C.

Ed Whelan is associated with the Ethics And Public Policy Center, a conservative “think tank” funded by, among others, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, who are also major donors to tea party astroturf groups, as well as the Scaife family, best know for bankrolling the anti-Clinton “vast right-wing conspiracy” in the 1990s.

A former law clerk to Antonin Scalia, the leading right-wing activist on the Supreme Court, Whelan once called Roe v . Wade, the “Dred Scott [decision] of our age.” In 2008, he suggested that Pres. Obama’s mother — whom he called “that woman” — would have aborted him if abortion had been legal in the United States (or perhaps he meant in Kenya) when she became pregnant.

After U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that California’s Proposition 8 was unconstitutional, Whelan published an essay titled “The Most Egregious Performance Ever by a Federal District Judge.”

“Walker’s course of conduct would be sufficient cause for national scandal in any case,” Whelan wrote. “That it comes in a case that aims to radically remake the central social institution of American society makes it utterly intolerable.”

Prof. Carlos Ball is the author of “From the Closet to the Courtroom: Five LGBT Rights Lawsuits That Have Changed our Nation (Queer Action/Queer Ideas)” and “The Morality of Gay Rights: An Exploration in Poltical Philosophy.” Ball and his partner, Richard Storrow, have two sons.

At a news conference yesterday, a reporter from the Washington Blade, a gay news outlet, asked Speaker John Boehner if holding a hearing on gay marriage was an appropriate use of taxpayer funds.

“There are a lot of committees, a lot of hearings,” Boehner said. “As I made it clear from the beginning of this year, the committee process is important to this institution, and I think addressing any question — serious question — in American society is legitimate.”