Phil and Alan Robertson, of A&E’s show “Duck Dynasty,” will join Fox News host Todd Starnes at an anti-gay rally sponsored by an officially-designated “hate group.”

The rally, called “I Stand Sunday,” is sponsored by the “Family Research Council,” an organization officially-designated as a “hate group” a few years back, and that has a long history of disseminating faux-science in order to harm gays and lesbians.

The rally is directed at Houston’s mayor, Anise Parker, who is openly-gay.

It’s also an interesting coincidence that the Family Research Council is holding this rally — I’m sorry, it’s a “church service” — only two days before the all-important mid-term elections that will decide who controls the US Senate. Apparently A&E stands for “anti-gay electioneering.”

In a nutshell, a local Republican party leader sued the city of Houston recently over a new civil rights ordinance covering gays and transgender people that 5 local churches want repealed, even though they were exempt from the ordinance. The churches launched a petition drive to put the matter on the ballot, and ended up not reaching the necessary number of signatures after the city found that they incorrectly filled out the forms. They’re particularly incensed that the city initially said they had enough signatures, until the city later realized the forms did not meet the city’s legal requirements for voter initiatives.

One of the key issues in the lawsuit is whether the churches knew the appropriate rules, and it appears from video evidence that at least one church did know the rules. So when the city, as part of the discovery process, subpoenaed information about what the other four churches knew, the GOP and its allies cried foul.

Of course, the problem for the churches is that they decided to enter the political process, then they apparently broke the rules, then their GOP allies sued the city, and now they’re complaining about, and claiming that they’re exempt from, what is standard procedure for a lawsuit: the discovery process.

City attorney David Feldman explains:

“If you’re going to use a church for a political process, then any communications that are made are just as subject to discovery as if you did it in a commercial building,” Feldman told me. “They chose to do it at churches. I didn’t tell them to do that. And it’s fine, except you can’t engage in a political activity at a church and pursue litigation regarding that and then hide behind the separation of church and state for not producing anything.”

But never wanting to miss an opportunity to grandstand on an issue affecting gays, a gay mayor — coincidentally only two days before a major election — nearly the entire Republican party noise machine has entered the fray, including A&E’s “Duck Dynasty,” a Fox News host, and religious right anti-gay activist Benham Brothers (the son of anti-abortion loon Flip Benham) who recently compared gay Americans to the terror group ISIS.

While it’s no surprise that Fox News might have little problem having its name on the Web page of a hate group’s anti-gay rally, it is odd that A&E has no problem with “Duck Dynasty” being emblazoned on the same page.

You’ll recall that this isn’t the first time A&E’s “Duck Dynasty” showed its anti-gay colors. And it looks like it won’t be Duck Dynasty’s last.