The annual Values Voter Summit (VVS), the nation’s largest gathering of the Religious Right, begins today. The event, sponsored by the Family Research Council (FRC), the American Family Association (AFA) and other far-right groups, is celebrating its 10-year anniversary. In light of that, I thought it might be interesting to look back at some of the highlights (or lowlights, if you will) of this event.

Here we go:

2005: The event, then known as the “Washington Briefing,” kicks off with a modest crowd of about 300 attendees. Top Republican leaders such as then Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) exhort attendees to do all they can to elect more Republicans – even though the FRC holds status as a tax-exempt, non-profit entity. Among the speakers is Bishop Wellington Boone, a pastor who tells the crowd that church-state separation is a myth because “God owns the church and state.” Boone goes on to say that when people accuse him of being extreme, he replies, “I can see through you; I know that behind you is your father the devil.”

2006: The event, now known as the Values Voter Summit, sparks controversy after Connie Marshner, a long-time political organizer for the far right, advises attendees to engage in deception to find out how their neighbors plan to vote. Marshner distributes an 18-page manual that recommends that activists use church directories and phone people, posing as pollster to learn which candidate they are supporting. When an attendee asks Marshner what the caller should say if asked if he or she was using a church list, she replies, “I haven’t heard a perfect answer to that question. It’s a delicate answer.” Later, incendiary right-wing columnist Ann Coulter calls liberals a “treason lobby.”

2007: A sense of uncertainty pervades the Summit as attendees split over which GOP candidate to support for president in 2008. Serial adulterer Newt Gingrich receives a hero’s welcome, and failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork warns attendees that Republicans must win the White House in 2008 because, “The Democrats are determined to appoint activist judges who will enact, as if it were constitutional doctrine, the liberal-left agenda.” At a closing banquet, country singer Lee Greenwood serenades Focus on the Family founder James Dobson with a song by Elton John (who is gay). Dobson rants for an hour about the “evil” of progressive politics and warns people that if states keep legalizing same-sex marriage, gays will “spread all across the country and establish families” and “marriage as we know it will be gone.”

2008: Attendance at the Summit hits 2,000. Perkins and others are embarrassed when the Associated Press reports that a Summit vendor had to be ejected for selling “Obama waffle mix” – a product that contains a racist drawing of Barack Obama on the box. With attendees in full-scale panic at the thought of an Obama presidency, the event takes on the feel of a two-day rally for Sarah Palin, then a candidate for the vice presidency – even though she did not attend. Speaker Sean Hannity from the Fox News Channel makes jokes about U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), who at the time was dying from an aggressive brain tumor.

2009: Bryan Fischer, a staffer at the American Family Association, tells the crowd that Adolf Hitler invented the concept of separation of church and state, remarking, “Politics do not belong in the church, the church must be separate from the state – these two mottos, these two slogans…came directly from the mind of Adolf Hitler.” The balance of the event is essentially an Obama bash-a-thon, with speakers plotting with attendees to help the GOP regain control of the House and Senate.

2010: Gil Mertz, an FRC staffer who serves as emcee of the event, reminds attendees that the media is present and implores them, “Don’t be the weird one.” Another speaker, an unsuccessful Alabama politician named Dale Peterson, fails to take Mertz’s advice to heart and spends several minutes explaining to reporters that Obama was not born in America and thus can’t be president. Former FRC head Gary Bauer launches into a long harangue against “The Elites,” a shadowy cabal he never quite defines. The Elites, he asserts, “treat the Constitution like toilet paper.”

2011: Robert Rector, senior research fellow in domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, tells the crowd that liberals hate marriage. “The left hates the institution of marriage,” he tells attendees. “They simply hate it.” Rector goes on to assert that some high schools make condoms available to students “to get gay liberation in the classrooms.” Glenn Beck advises youngsters who are too poor to go to college to study instead at public libraries. Retired Army Gen. William Boykin, lifting a page from phony historian David Barton, makes up some stuff about the Constitution, asserting that our nation’s foundational document is based on a series of colonial-era sermons. He offered no evidence for this.

2012: Summiteers swallow their bigotry and line up behind GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. Romney sends a video to the VVS, but his running mate, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) shows up in person to rally the troops. Ryan tells the “non-partisan” crowd, “We know what we’re up against. We know how desperate our opponents are to cling to power, but we’re ready…. Let’s get this done and elect Mitt Romney as the next president of America.” The Rev. Dan Fisher, pastor of a Baptist church in Oklahoma, tells attendees, “Friends, we’ve been lied to. We’ve been sold a bill of goods of separation of church and state, which is nothing more than a lie, twisted out of a misused phrase out of a Thomas Jefferson letter in 1802. It’s all a lie!”

2013: Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon with designs on the White House, tells the crowd of about 3,000, “Obamacare is the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery. And in a way it is slavery because it’s making us subservient to the government.” Luther Strange, attorney general of Alabama, outlines how state officials can block “tyranny” by gumming up federal laws and mandates.

2014: The Summit features an array of possible GOP contenders for 2016. U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), never known as a tent evangelist, tells the crowd, “What America needs is not just another politician or more promises. What America really needs is a revival!” Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin resurfaces to warn attendees, “You don’t retreat – you reload the truth.” She also attacks the occupant of “1400 Pennsylvania Avenue,” mangling the address of the White House. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana warns about secular government, telling the crowd, “Many want us to believe that a secular society is a desirable goal. If our culture is sick, capitalism, democracy and military might will not save us. The countries of Western Europe have weakened themselves by adopting a secular worldview which pushes matter of faith to the side. I’ve got no interest in seeing America go the way of Europe.”

How they can the Summit’s leadership possibly top all of this extremism? It’s a challenge, but somehow I suspect they will.