Ex-Gay Watch notes that US anti-gay activist Paul Cameron recently addressed a meeting in the UK of the Christian Council of Britain, a front-organisation of Nick Griffin’s far-right and racist British Nationalist Party. Quoting from the organisation’s website:
The CCoB is launching a series of public debates on morality and family values and how current and proposed legislation is destroying freedom of speech, preaching and individual moral choice. The inaugural conference is in London on October 26th 2007, where the subject is ‘The Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill (Proposed Amendments) – Morality and Family Values. Introduced by the CCoB Moderator, the Rev. R.W.B. West, our speaker is Dr. Paul Cameron of the Family Re[se]arch Institute, Colorado, USA.
Cameron is notorious for a string of inflammatory pseudo-scientific publications, and his statistical “research” is often cited by the US Christian right in their efforts to oppose gay rights. As the Southern Poverty Law Center reports:
“Homosexuality is an infectious appetite with personal and social consequences,” is how Cameron describes the phenomenon he studies. “It is like the dog that gets a taste for blood after killing its first victim and desires to get more victims thereafter with a ravenous hunger.”
…Religious right action groups including Focus on the Family, the American Family Association, the Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition promote Cameron’s statistics on their Web sites. The Christian Communications Network, a public relations firm run by anti-abortion zealot Gary McCullough — media adviser to Operation Rescue and the parents of Terri Schiavo, whose feeding tube removal sparked a major controversy — publicizes Cameron’s findings to religious newspapers and helps distribute tens of thousands of his heavily footnoted pamphlets to church congregations.
I blogged on Cameron here.
RWB West, meanwhile, is the absurd “Reverend” Robert West; I played a role in bringing him to public attention last year. West, whose “Apostolic Church” denominational affiliation is obscure (an established group of the name disavows any knowledge of him), was a Conservative Party town councillor who addressed a meeting of the far-right British Nationalist Party last year. I transcribed a section, in which he described multi-racial society as
…a transgression of God’s will…Adam and his descendants were commanded by God to fill the earth, not to come to one part of it, namely England. The refusal of Adam’s surviving descendants through Noah to spread out led to God’s judgement at Babel, and his confusing of the tongues…The blossoming of what I call the proto-race…into many nations was to be a manifestation of God’s glory, like light passing through a prism.
A similar statement on the importance of racial separation appears on the CCoB website.
The Christian Council of Britain also tried to hijack conservative Christian protests against Jerry Springer: The Opera, although the group leading the protest, Christian Voice, quickly repudiated any association. West was also denounced by other Christian groups, and the Conservative Party made it clear he was unwanted. West soon defected to the BNP, and lost his seat at the last election. Given that the CCoB website has been largely inactive for the last 18 months or more, I had thought we had seen the last of West. Alas not, it seems.
The revamped CCoB website has no mention of Clive Potter, who at one point was supposed to be the CCoB’s president; Potter received unwelcome attention back in July, when it was revealed that he was the unmarried live-in partner of a BNP activist who acted as the (since removed) “media consultant” to the British affiliate of the US abstinence organisation, Silver Ring Thing (they claim to share a bed, but without having sex).
Cameron’s visit to the CCoB comes shortly after BNP leader Nick Griffin spoke to Young Americans for Freedom at Michigan State University.
“Rev” Robert West
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