LGBT lobby group sics FBI on conservative columnist for tweet
When a conservative columnist got a visit from the FBI, he was surprised to discover it was because of a tongue-in-cheek message he had written on Twitter. Austin Ruse had noticed that the Human Rights Campaign , an LGBT lobby group that targets social conservatives and other dissidents , was running a campaign on Twitter asking business owners to place LGBT “rainbows” somewhere visible on their premises, preferably on their front windows. Reminded of protection rackets, Ruse called out the Human Rights Campaign on their invitation. “That’s a nice business. Too bad if something happened to it,” he tweeted. In response, the Human Rights Campaign made a civil rights complaint to the FBI. By law, the FBI had to follow up, and so Ruse found him having to explain his tweet over the phone to an FBI agent. “I told him it was a reference to the mafia shaking down businesses for protection,” Ruse recalled. “Of course, he knew that. He chuckled when I told him. You could tell he was rather