CPAC Dumps Director Who Ridiculed Eligibility Issue

The staff director of the nation's largest annual gathering of conservatives was dismissed  by the American Conservative Union today, a year after publicly embracing the homosexual activist group GOProud and ridiculing those suggesting Barack Obama had not proven his constitutional eligibility to serve as president.

In a board meeting, the ACU, the host of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, voted to replace Lisa De Pasquale as executive director of the event. Earlier this year, following the CPAC meeting in February, ACU Chairman David Keene was replaced by Washington lobbyist Al Cardenas.

The acceptance of GOProud as a participating sponsor of CPAC led to major controversy within conservative ranks, with many previous sponsors, including the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council, Concerned Women of America and American Family Association, all abandoning the event their sponsorship in 2011.

But it is on the eligibility issue that the ACU has made its most dramatic turnaround. Last year, after receiving a private email from WND’s Joseph Farah, offering to organize a panel on the eligibility issue for CPAC, De Pasquale never responded – except publicly in the Los Angeles Times where she scoffed at the request.

“Farah asked if he could speak on the issue (birther movement), but that isn't something we're interested in,” she told the paper. “It would fill a room. But so would a two-headed monkey. There really are so many more important issues, and it's only a three-day conference."

This year, however, as WND previously reported, ACU is using the popularity of the eligibility issue as a fundraising vehicle. The group is now soliciting funds for a national advertising campaign based on the theme that Obama is not eligible to be president.

The key argument of the ACU solicitation is that Obama is ineligible to be president because he was adopted by his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, and, as a consequence, became a citizen of Indonesia when he lived as a child in Indonesia for four years with his mother and his stepfather.Read more