Forget Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. Forget Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage. Forget even the American Family Association’s bilious Bryan Fischer. The most potent force pushing anti-gay bigotry in America is Frank Schubert, a man whose name is relatively unknown but who has empowered each of those individuals and many more in their anti-gay crusades, a man who stripped his own lesbian sister and her children of their rights in exchange for big money.
Schubert clearly knows he’s peddling distortions and is demonizing gays in his own lucrative cottage industry of homophobia, and now he also seems to sense that he’s on the losing side of a civil rights battle. This week that became more evident than ever in a lengthy interview with me in which he couldn’t adequately answer basic questions about his mission, becoming so frustrated and agitated that he eventually lashed out and called me a “dummy.”
Schubert is the strategist who ran the campaign that convinced voters to pass Proposition 8 in California in 2008, using ads that, among other things, framed gay marriage as dangerous to children. He moved on from there to other states and helped in the campaign that got three judges who had ruled in favor of marriage equality removed from the Iowa Supreme Court in retention elections in 2010. He successfully beat back marriage equality in Maine at the ballot box in 2009, and he got the marriage amendment passed in the brutal battle in North Carolina last May, a battle that inspired anti-gay preachers to call for violence and even death for gays.
