The National Right to Life Committee, the nation’s largest anti-choice organization, will hold its annual convention in Charlotte June 18-20 (Charlotte Observer story here).

The group’s annual convention, being held at the Blake Hotel in Uptown Charlotte, will feature dozens of speakers, including anti-choice and anti-gay activists and leaders.

U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) will speak at the group’s closing banquet. The anti-gay Smith has worked against not only on abortion issues, but also LGBT issues (h/t PHB):

In a 1973 article for The Signal, the newspaper of Trenton State College (now the College of New Jersey), Smith addressed the “current upsurge in identity reversal, sexual perversion, and permissiveness” pervading the country in the form of homosexuality, which, he concluded, represented “the falling away from God and His law.” It was a bizarre, rambling screed, predicated upon the premise that “Manhood is heterosexuality; so is womanhood,” and concluded with the observation that, “[God] wants good things for all of us and the most basic starting point is the awareness of our sex.”

Though Smith may have tempered his rhetoric over the years to suit the increasing societal tolerance of the times, he has always been a reliable anti-gay vote in Congress. In 1995, he co-sponsored a bill, the entire text of which was the following sentence: “No Federal funds may be used directly or indirectly to promote, condone, accept, or celebrate homosexuality, lesbianism, or bisexuality.” The bill’s author was the notoriously homophobic and rambunctious California Representative Bob Dornan. While it’s unclear what the full implications of the bill would have been had it passed, it likely would have prevented any public employee, or employee of any organization or company that accepts federal funds, from being openly gay. In 2006, Smith earned a zero rating from the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group. A call to Smith’s office for comment on this article went unreturned.

Another speaker Wesely J. Smith, a “Senior Fellow in Human Rights and Bioethics at the Discovery Institute,” is, no doubt, a conservative — he works mainly on issues of bioethics, works against the legalization of assisted suicide and works for the Discovery Institute, a group made famous for its advocacy for teaching intelligent design in public schools.

But, surprisingly, my extensive morning Google searches pulled up nothing explicitly anti-gay about the man (if anyone else knows anything, send it my way – matt ‘at’ interstateq ‘dot’ com). In fact, he has the guts to stand up to more radical, anti-gay voices.

When Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theologicial Seminary, advocated for genetic manipulation to change the sexual orientation of fetuses if they are found to be predisposed to homosexuality, Smith said such genetic tinkering amounted to turning “procreation into made to order manufacture.”

Smith warned, “How is this in any less eugenics than, say, redesigning a baby with normal intelligence to be an Einstein, redesigning a child who will be diminutive, to be tall, or redesigning a baby with normal hearing to be deaf? Once we accept that children can be remade to suit parental desires for their children–which is a different matter than, say, correcting a heart defect–we have bought into Brave New World.”

In arguing for bioethics and principles of universal human equality in the San Francisco Chronicle, Smith seemed to understand the basic dynamics of anti-LGBT, as well as others’, oppression (emphasis added):

Bioethicists are, for the most part, good and earnest people striving to improve society. The issues with which they grapple are important and compelling. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see where their rejection of universal human equality leads.

History teaches us that judging human worth based on subjective criteria — race, sex, sexual orientation, tribe, religion, nationality or personhood — invariably results in the oppression, exploitation or even killing of those deemed by the powerful to be less worthy of respect.

But, if anyone has any doubts to the conservative, anti-gay nature of the National Right to Life Committee, one needs to look no further than their cozy position next to Focus on the Family. Playing the ultimate buddy-buddy game with James Dobson and his mammoth anti-gay/ex-gay hate group, National Right to Life actually banished a state affiliate for challenging Dobson on issues of abortion.

I’ll keep my eye open next week as the National Right to Life convention starts up. I might try to attend Chris Smith’s closing speech. I’ll report back then.