Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Young attendees at CPAC conference asked to respond to the idea of climate change.

Compare to another young attendee’s views on race.

ThinkProgress:

ThinkProgress spoke with Terry, who sported a Rick Santorum sticker and attended CPAC with a friend who wore a Confederate Flag-emblazoned t-shirt, about his views after the panel. Terry maintained that white people have been “systematically disenfranchised” by federal legislation.

When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was.

At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”

He claimed to be a direct descendent of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Huffington Post:

“I’m embarrassed to call myself a Republican right now,” Jimmy LaSalvia, co-founder and president of the gay conservative group GOProud, said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., on Thursday. The gay Republican was referring to GOProud’s exclusion from participation at CPAC for a second year in a row, banned as an official sponsor. LaSalvia attended CPAC as a guest of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a sponsor of CPAC which hosted a panel Thursday on which LaSalvia appeared, “A Rainbow on the Right: Growing the Coalition, Bringing Tolerance Out of the Closet.”

At the packed panel, attended by younger CPAC members, including quite a few conservative gays and lesbians, conservative commentators and activists on the panel who support marriage equality, including CNN pundit Margaret Hoover and Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, made the case for gay marriage as a conservative value. Earlier in the day Senator Marco Rubio, criticized those who would call him a “bigot” for not supporting same-sex marriage, underscoring the tension the issue continues to cause among conservatives. LaSalvia, for his part, however, agreed with Rubio, making a similar statement during the panel discussion and getting applause from the audience