Yesterday, the Family Research Council hosted a panel discussion titled “Marriage and Civil Rights: How to Respond Rightly If the Court Gets It Wrong,” which sought to portray anti-LGBT conservatives as the heirs of the Civil Rights Movement.

Ken Blackwell, an FRC official who previously served as the secretary of state of Ohio, where he notoriously curbed voting access in the 2004 presidential election, said that anti-LGBT activists should take lessons in “direct action of resistance” from “the great Civil Rights Movement” and opponents of abortion rights.

He suggested that LGBT rights victories must be resisted since they are paving the way for a totalitarian form of government: “We are now at one of those pivotal moments in our nation’s history because any survey of human history will let you know that every totalitarian regime throughout human history, every authoritarian regime, every big welfare state regime, from the Bolsheviks to the Chinese to an administration that is growing the state right here in America, there are two things that they do. They destroy or weaken the family because the family, within our experience, is the incubator of liberty. Two, they silence the church and those in the pews of the church.”