12/30/08 – SPLC: Tony Alamo awarded the “Creepiest Cult Leader Award”
Southern Poverty Law Center
December 30, 2008
by Mark Potok
The Last Word: Hatewatch’s 2nd Annual Smackdown Awards
It’s been another sorry year in the world of hate, as knuckle-dragging white supremacists and their fellow travelers did their best to make our country a little worse with each new passing day. Here at Hatewatch, we’ve been hard at work trying to winnow away the garden-variety savagery that habitués of our blog know so well in favor of truly extraordinary examples of asinine activities from the benighted denizens of the radical right. It hasn’t been easy for members of the Hatewatch 2nd Annual Smackdown Awards Committee, who’ve had to wade heroically through the sewers and cesspools to produce our list. But now they’ve returned from that underworld, muddied but unbowed, to offer our readers, without further ado, Hatewatch’s year-end countdown of the very, very worst of 2008:
9. Creepiest Cult Leader Award
After last year’s recognition of neo-Nazi boss Kevin Alfred Strom for his arrest on charges of possession of child pornography — not to mention his version of “Here We Come A-Wassailing,” detailing his interest in marrying a 10-year-old girl — it’s been hard to find real competition in the Icky Sexual Proclivities Department. But just when we were beginning to despair, along came Tony Alamo, the cult leader known for his blistering hatred of Catholics and homosexuals. Turns out that the 74-year-old Alamo allegedly had something in common with Strom, who emerged from prison last fall after serving time on the kiddie porn charges. In truly awful documents filed in court this fall, a 14-year-old girl accused Alamo of fondling her in the shower; another said she was about 9 when Alamo “married” her; and a third recounted having sex with him at age 11. According to a confidential source, Alamo, who goes on trial in February on 10 counts related to transporting underage girls across state lines for sex, kept candy and Barbie dolls in his bedroom.