One day before the crucial South Carolina primary, Rick Santorum is beginning to win the endorsements of not just Religious Right luminaries but also fringe activists, including some who previously backed the failed presidential campaigns of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Santorum recently won the backing of Religious Right activists such as James Dobson, Gary Bauer, Richard Viguerie, Maggie Gallagher, Penny Nance and most recently, former Perry booster John Stemberger.
Today, Viguerie released the names of additional Religious Right figures that are supporting Santorum, including Paul Pressler, the Southern Baptist leader who hosted the recent Texas meeting of social conservatives.
But other Santorum endorsers are less well-known:
- Cathie Adams of the Texas Eagle Forum, who has likened President Obama to Adolf Hitler, warned that scientists are cloning humans in order to give them diseases and kill them and that the United Nations is trying to “subvert our children’s faith in God by elevating its earth-centered zealotry that would grant the UN dominion over the earth.”
- Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness, who has dedicated her career to fighting the rights of gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military, argued that it would lead to a draft along with “forcible sodomy.”
- William Estrada of Generation Joshua, the homeschooler activist who hopes that young people will lead the fight against marriage equality.
- Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily, the birther movement leader and onetime Bachmann supporter who wants to see Obama “frog-marched down Pennsylvania Avenue” and an unfailing critic of equal rights for gays and lesbians.
- Michael Geer of the Pennsylvania Family Institute who has crusaded against marriage equality, calling it a “tragedy.”
- Rebecca Hagelin, formerly of the Heritage Foundation, who derided gays as “bullies” and “power-mongers,” cautioning that gay rights leads to pedophilia and “chaos.”
- Tim Lefever of the Capitol Resource Institute, who said that Californians should repeal SB48, which ensures students learn about LGBT historical figures...because it undermines lessons in the Constitution.
- William Murray of the Religious Freedom Coalition, who ironically was a fierce opponent of the construction of the Park 51 Islamic Community Center near Ground Zero, and suggested that a train crash happened because the negligent engineer was gay.
- Preston Noell III of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, Property, a pseudo-military, extremist, anti-gay group linked to Brazilian neo-fascists.
- Pam Olsen of the Florida Prayer Network and the International House of Prayer’s Tallahassee branch, is a former Perry campaign activist who advocates Seven Mountain dominionism, plans to raise people from the dead, and believes that gay rights cause natural disasters:
All in all, about the people you would expect to endorse Rick Santorum.
