AL-01: Dean Young — A Decade Of Playing The Gay Card
He is running in the reddest of red territory, and this sort of hate speech is de rigeur in those parts if you’re running a serious Republican campaign:
Republican congressional candidate Dean Young, who will face off against fellow Republican Bradley Byrne in a runoff election in Alabama’s 1st district on Tuesday, said in 2002 that gay rights activists should “go back to California or Vermont or wherever they came from” if they don’t like the policies in the Yellowhammer State.
In 2002, then-Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore argued in an opinion on a child custody case that homosexuality is an “‘inherent evil against which children must be protected.” Moore’s ruling was met with backlash from gay rights activists, who called for the judge’s resignation.
After a rally against Moore at the state Supreme Court, Young, then the executive director of the Christian Family Association, spoke out in defense of Moore’s opinion.
Has he toned it down? Not a chance, as Raw Story reported back in August:
An Alabama candidate for Congress is making his opposition to same sex marriage the central plank in his electoral platform. Mobile, AL NBC affiliate WPMI reported that Dean Young is running to fill a Congressional seat left vacant by Rep. Josiah “Jo” Bonner (R-AL), who retired Aug. 2.
“I’m against homosexuals pretending like they’re married,” Young told WPMI. “If you want to have homosexuals pretending like they’re married, then go to the Democrat party.”
Young feels that many Republicans in Congress are not sufficiently anti-LGBT.
“Congress is weak and spineless,” he said. “We get these mealy-mouthed politicians that just want to move up the ladder, and they won’t tell people where they stand.”
To that end, he has written a six-part pledge against same sex marriage support that he hopes all of the Republican candidates in the race to represent Alabama’s District 1 will sign.
