CPAC pays the price for gay embrace

ACU chairman David Keene

The American Principles Project, a group devoted to promoting the U.S. Constitution, is refusing to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference this year because a homosexual activist organization is being permitted to participate.

"We want to highlight the incompatibility of the homosexual agenda, to redefine marriage, with the conservative principle of supporting the institution of marriage as the fundamental unit of society," APP communications director Thomas Peters told WND.

With a Nov. 15 open letter to American Conservative Union chairman David Keene, APP becomes the first group this year to announce publicly its decision to stay away from CPAC over the issue. ACU organizes CPAC every year.

The American Family Association is also deciding whether to stay away from CPAC again this year over GOProud.

"We didn't send our radio talk show hosts up there last year because of GOProud," said AFA president Tim Wildmon. "We will have to look at their level of participation this year. In the next couple of weeks we'll decide."

The Family Research Council is working with ACU directly about the GOProud issue.

"We have communicated privately with the board with the desire to see this resolved in a way that benefits America's families," Family Research Council vice president for communications JP Duffy told WND.

Several prominent pro-family groups withdrew from CPAC last year when the American Conservative Union first decided to welcome GOProud.

"It's not my place to judge who's a conservative group and who's not, as long as they agree with the ACU statement of principles," ACU's Lisa De Pasquale, chief organizer of CPAC, told WND. The ACU statement makes no mention of social issues including abortion and sexual morality.

"… [I]t is inconceivable that the public conditions of economic freedom and national strength can subsist when the institutions of marriage and family are subverted," wrote APP president Frank Cannon in the letter to the ACU.

" … [W]e can only conclude that the [GOProud's] purposes are fundamentally incompatible with a movement that has long embraced the ideals of family and faith in a thriving civil society,"

In the letter, Cannon also takes GOProud to task for attacking one of the nation's most prominent social conservative leaders, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.

"GOProud has chosen this very hour to attempt to attack Sen. Jim DeMint and even question his place, and the place of those of us who share his socially conservative views, in the conservative movement," wrote Cannon.

GOProud also wrote a letter this week asking GOP congressional leaders to ignore social issues and implying association with the tea-party movement, a stand angrily denounced by several tea-party leaders.

APP describes itself as an organization "dedicated to preserving and propagating the fundamental principles on which our country was founded – universal principles, embracing the notion that we are all, 'created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'"