The Minnesota preacher who filed a $50 million defamation lawsuit Wednesday against MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and Minnesota Independent reporter Andy Birkey has a long track record of broadcasting antigay comments, Think Progress LGBT's Zack Ford writes.
You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International's Bradlee Dean claims that Maddow and Birkey maliciously took some of his comments out of context while ignoring a ministry disclaimer condemning calls to execute gay people — this to achieve both journalists' end-goal, according to the complaint, of “significantly [harming] the ‘big political prize’ which they loathe, Christian conservative presidential candidate Michele Bachmann,” who has “twice lent her name to [the ministry's] fundraising efforts.”
But Ford posted an extensive history of Dean's support for prosecution and incarceration of gay people, as well as assertions that a “homosexual agenda” is infiltrating the Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota.
The district has been sued by the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of students who allege that they have been harassed because of their sexual orientation; Anoka-Hennepin has a policy instructing teachers to be “neutral” on sexual orientation issues, one that attorneys for the students have called “blatantly discriminatory and unconstitutional.”
Ford notes that Dean had been scheduled to appear on Michelangelo Signorile’s Sirius XM show Wednesday afternoon but canceled his appearance, claiming he was “overwhelmed” by interview requests.
Dean’s complaint against Maddow, Birkey, and their respective media organizations, is available here.
Dean is represented in the suit by Larry Klayman, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney and founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch.
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