The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), an aggressive pro-homosexual activist group, has launched a campaign targeted at silencing conservative, Christian, and pro-family commentators who offer the media perspective that is often at odds with political efforts to normalize homosexual behavior. According to a GLAAD press release, the group’s Commentator Accountability Project is supposedly aimed at educating the media “about the extreme rhetoric of over three dozen activists who are often given a platform to speak in opposition to [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] people and the issues that affect their lives.”

“Hate is not an expert opinion,” GLAAD spokesman Herndon Graddick charged of the balanced perspective offered by such Christian and pro-family leaders as Charles Colson, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, and Focus on the Family’s Jim Daly, to name just three of the 36 leaders targeted (see all the names HERE). “In most cases, news outlets invite reputable experts to speak on the subject at hand, but when talking about LGBT issues, open hostility and anti-LGBT bias seems to be all the credibility required.” Graddick claimed that his group’s project “holds these so-called ‘pundits’ accountable for the extreme anti-LGBT rhetoric they continue to spread.”

GLAAD’s communications director, Rich Ferraro, told Politico.com that the three dozen commentators — nearly all of them highly respected leaders in the Christian and pro-family community —“are being booked in local and national news as ‘experts’ on the lives of LGBT people….” However, what reporters and producers do not know, Ferraro insisted, is that that these trained, educated, and seasoned professionals “aren’t experts, but people who have dedicated their careers to making life more difficult for LGBT people.”

Hecomplained that merely having a scripturally based view of homosexuality — what he refered to as being “anti-LGBT” — “should not be a qualification for speaking about LGBT people and issues.”

Ferraro insisted that GLAAD is not trying to silence the voices of the commentators, but merely to force them to be accountable for their supposedly hateful rhetoric. “If a reporter is speaking with one of these voices who has repeatedly stated

This article originally appeared on: http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/family/11248-gay-group-targets-conservative-christian-pro-family-voices