They still let Perkins get away with saying that kids do better with both a mother and father than with same-sex parents without correcting him and saying that it was PROVEN in a court of law at the Prop 8 trial that this isn’t true. Upon cross-examination, the witnesses in the trial making that claim had to admit that the children raised by same-sex parents do as well as those raised by opposite-sex parents.

Small steps — he’s been challenged on that one before, and it will just take repeated challenges to drive the point home, because he won’t change his tune.

What was most illuminating about this one is Chris Matthews grilling Perkins and calling him out on his waffling. It’s about time — Matthews should have taken this tack long ago, instead of fawning over the lying (unmentionable) every time he had him on the show.

In Nov of 2010 Perkins was on Hardball and cited data from the discredited American College of Pediatricians to claim that gay men molest children at far higher rates than others.

Matthews was forced to come on his show the following day and correct the record that the American College of Pediatricians, although an official sounding group, is a professional organization for socially conservative pediatricians and healthcare professionals, the group has taken a number of hard-line positions when it comes to LGBT rights, advocating for a prohibition against adoption rights for same-sex couples and also offering high praise for reparative therapy.

Like NARTH, ACPeds was born from an ideological split within a profession. It was founded in 2002 as a protest against the much larger American Academy of Pediatrics’ support for LGBT adoption rights — and that opposition remains central to the group’s identity.

ACPeds is believed to have no more than 200 members, a tiny fraction of the nearly 60,000 professionals who belong to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

But thanks to its deceptive name — which makes it sound as if it is the mainstream professional organization for pediatricians — ACPeds often serves as a supposedly scientific source for groups pushing utter falsehoods about LGBT people.

The truth, as the American Psychological Association says in an official statement, is that “homosexual men are not more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual men are.”

Citing this kind of deceptive data is one of the reasons the SPLC designated FRC as a hate group.

I often wonder why Matthews doesn’t seem to remember this incident and hasn’t treated Perkins’ statements with more caution ever since.

I’ve been on the opposite side of an argument with Barney Frank and let me tell you, it isn’t a pleasant experience. I was disappointed that Frank didn’t point out that Perkins’ organization is an official hate group. I think the reason Matthews was so hard on Perkins and why he has him come back is to get a chance to beat on him a bit more.

The problem is, as far as I know Matthews has never held Perkins’ feet to the fire before — this is a first.

Maybe some other talk show hosts will take the hint.