Peter LaBarbera of the anti-gay group Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, organized the Pride Week news conference. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

Representatives of five organizations that oppose LGBT rights held a news conference on Tuesday outside the headquarters of the Human Rights Campaign in D.C. to express opposition to HRC’s advocacy for LGBT equality and the celebration of LGBT Pride.

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“Our bottom line is that homosexuality is nothing to be proud of,” said Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, which organized the news conference.

“In fact, practicing homosexual behavior, a destructive sin, is something to be ashamed of,” LaBarbera said. “Out-and-proud homosexualism – far from being a human right – is actually a human wrong.”

LaBarbera, whose organization is based in Chicago, said he and the other LGBT rights opponents chose to hold their news conference at the HRC building during LGBT Pride Month in June to voice their opposition to what they called a harmful “lifestyle.”

In anticipation of the news conference HRC displayed a large banner from a first-floor window stating, “Welcome Peter.”

Two members of the groups participating in the news conference displayed their own banner behind a podium where the representatives spoke stating, “Homosexuality is nothing to be proud of – but overcoming it is.”

Linda Harvey (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

Others speaking at the news conference included Matt Barber, vice president of Liberty Counsel Action, a legal group that opposes same-sex marriage and LGBT rights; Linda Harvey, founder of Mission America, a conservative Christian group; Diane Gramley, president of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania; and Eric Holmberg, identified as a member of the Apologetics Group and producer of a documentary, “Is Gay the New Black? Homosexuality and the Civil Rights Movement.”

Fred Sainz, HRC’s vice president for communications, was among several HRC employees who came out to observe the news conference.

“[T]hese are individuals who are out of the mainstream even within anti-equality activists circles,” Sainz said in a statement to the Blade. “Fringe is too polite a term for them.”

He added, “The unfortunate reality is that there are still Americans – a diminishing number every day – who will believe what these folks have to say and will pass on their beliefs in the form of discrimination and maybe even violence.”

Barber, an attorney, accused HRC of being part of a possible conspiracy with IRS officials whom Barber said appear to have illegally leaked a confidential tax filing from the anti-gay National Organization of Marriage (NOM) in March 2012.

The leaked 990 IRS report, among other things, included the names of 50 contributors to NOM’s 2008 campaign in support of California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in the state. Among the contributors on the list was a political action committee formed by 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

At the time of the leak, NOM President Brian Brown noted that then HRC President Joe Solmonese was among the ceremonial co-chairs of President Obama’s re-election committee and the IRS leak suggested that high-level Obama administration officials could be behind the leak.

At a hearing last month before the House Ways and Means Committee, Acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller testified that the IRS investigated the leaked NOM 990 report and determined a low-level IRS employee inadvertently released the document. Miller said disciplinary action was taken against the employee for not following proper procedures.

Harvey of the Mission America group said at the news conference gay rights leaders were jeopardizing young people with same-sex attractions by pushing for laws that ban therapists and others from performing so called gay conversion therapy on people below the age of 18. Harvey said consenting youth should be allowed to undergo conversation therapy at any age to eliminate same-sex attractions.

“Is homosexuality a human right? No it’s not,” Harvey said. “But the organization in the building behind me thinks it is…The Human Rights Campaign is spreading sweeping lies across America.”

“If the charges being made weren’t so laughable, they’d be sad,” HRC’s Sainz said in his statement.

At various times during the news conference the voices of Harvey and other speakers were drowned out by loud engine noise from large dump trucks lined up in front of the HRC building waiting to haul away debris from a construction site next to the HRC building.