Congratulations, I guess.
After more than 30 years of anti-gay activism, Steven Hotze picked up the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on Wednesday.
The Alabama civil rights group labeled Hotze’s Conservative Republicans of Texas (CRT) an anti-LGBT hate group in its annual report on extremist organizations.
Hotze, an influential and deep-pocketed Republican donor from Houston, was among the top funders of the successful campaign to repeal the city’s Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) in November.
“What we look at in the anti-LGBT groups is primarily the use of lies, of falsehoods, that have the effect of demonizing gay people,” SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok said. “So, it’s not merely that they opposed the HERO ordinance; it’s the way in which they did it — the description of gay people as pedophiles and so on.”
[…]
CRT becomes the fourth anti-LGBT hate group in Texas, and the third added to SPLC’s list, in two years.
“These groups are on the defensive against huge social changes that they cannot stop,” Potok said. “The religious right has suffered very serious losses, losses from which it will not recover, and an enormous amount of rage has resulted.”
Click over if you want to see or be reminded of a couple of the more charming things Hotze said during the HERO fight. Mark Potok is right that the likes of Hotze have lost a lot of ground in recent years, but as HERO showed they can still win some battles, and they’re surely not going to go away without a nasty fight. The Press has more.