Ken Blackwell

—Senior Fellow at the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a hate group.

—Believes “homosexuality is a compulsion that can be contained, repressed or changed.”

—Said being gay is “a transgression against God’s law,” adding, “Our expectation is that one’s genetic makeup might make one more inclined to be an arsonist or might make one more inclined to be a kleptomaniac. Do I think they can be changed? Yes.”

—Cited “attacks” on marriage and family as reason for a mass murder: “When you see there’s a crumbling of the moral foundation of the country, you see the attack on the—on natural marriage and the family that has been a part of the, not only the moral foundation and the upbringing of our children but the teaching of sexual roles and the development of human sexuality in our culture. When these fundamental institutions are attacked and destroyed and weakened and abandoned, you get what we are now seeing and that is a flood of these disturbed people in our society that are causing great, great pain. And as opposed to dealing with the foundational problems, we look for ways of blaming the Second Amendment, or blaming knives or blaming cars when they are used. At the end of the day, you have just underscored the problem. This is a convenient way of avoiding talking about what’s at the root cause.”

—Claimed marriage for same-sex couples was akin to, or would lead to incestuous marriage: “If your only requirement for a marriage is that people love each other, have a committed relationship to each other, and that they give their consent, then you cannot bar twins from marrying. Once you’ve permitted identical twins to marry, how can you bar twin brother and sister from marrying? They love each other. They have a committed relationship. None of us has had such a biological bond since before birth with our own spouses.”

—Claimed of President Obama’s support for marriage equality: “Abolishing marriage is what he is doing. Not changing. Not expanding. More than re-defining marriage, he is abolishing it.”

—Insisted that progressives who support marriage equality are “tearing up America’s morality by the roots. They’re forcing America to abandon God’s standards of right and wrong, and in consequence our society is becoming increasingly unmoored from reality.”

—Referred to marriage for same-sex couples as a joke: “In all of Western civilization, you know, there have been societies that celebrating the homosexuality [sic], the ancient Greeks. But they, in fact, protected the institution of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. They got the joke. And the American people get the joke.”

—Suggested Sesame Street is a “direct assault on this country’s moral foundation” because it supposedly teaches boys to want to grow up to want to be prom queen.