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GOP Presidential Hopefuls To Join Confederacy Sympathizer At 'Liberty' Event

This weekend, GOP presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal are scheduled to speak at the National Religious Liberties Conference, an event whose chief organizer, Kevin Swanson(link is external), and several other speakers(link is external) have advocated the death penalty for gay people.

Seeing that Swanson also believes the country’s first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, introduced communism to America(link is external), it came as no surprise to see that he invited John Eidsmoe to speak at the summit.

Eidsmoe, who briefly gained national(link is external) attention(link is external) in 2012 when then-presidential candidate Michele Bachmann identified him as her mentor, is known mostly for his view that the government must impose biblical law(link is external).

Like Swanson, Eidsmoe is also no fan of Lincoln, telling a Secession Day rally in Alabama (link is external) in 2010 that the state had a “constitutional right to secede” and “Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun understood the Constitution better than did Abraham Lincoln and Daniel Webster.” Cheering on Confederate leaders at a secessionist rally is par for the course for Eidsmoe(link is external), who has a record(link is external) of addressing white supremacist groups (link is external)and even denounced the freeing of slaves as “inhumane and irresponsible(link is external).” His ties to neo-Confederate groups caused one Tea Party group to drop Eidsmoe(link is external) from an event.

Unsurprisingly, Eidsmoe has also criticized women in the workplace(link is external), painted gays as child molesters(link is external) and warned that homosexuality will destroy society(link is external).

One theme(link is external) at the National Religious Liberty Conference will be “interposition(link is external),” the idea that elected officials have a duty to defy laws and court rulings that they believe are ungodly, a belief that was popular among Confederates, and later segregationists, trying to preserve racist state laws. (One workshop on interposition will be delivered by an activist who wants gay people to face the death penalty(link is external)).

Another scheduled speaker, prominent Iowa conservative activist Bob Vander Plaats, has suggested that African Americans were better off under slavery(link is external), and a radio host appearing at the event, Jan Mickelson, has even called for the reintroduction of slavery (link is external) (although this time subjugating undocumented immigrants who refuse to leave the U.S.) and said that the Confederacy was wrongly “invaded”(link is external) by the Union, adding, “I don’t consider the North amongst ourselves.”

But if you’re planning to go to a conference hosted by a pastor who thinks the Girl Scouts(link is external)soccer(link is external) and movies like “Frozen”(link is external) turn kids gay, then you can’t be surprised when he invites his Confederate-sympathizing friend to the event.