Senator Defends Speech Before Alleged White Supremacists : Politics: Don Rogers says Bakersfield gathering is for ‘patriotic Americans.’

State Sen. Don Rogers, under fire for his plans to address an organization accused of white supremacist beliefs, dismissed the criticism Wednesday, saying that as far as he is concerned the group consists of “patriotic Americans.”

The Republican from Tehachapi, who consistently ranks among the state Senate’s most conservative members, says he accepted an invitation to speak at a dinner Saturday night during the fourth annual Jubilation Celebration and Conference in Bakersfield.

Joining him in the lineup of speakers is Louis Beam Jr., a former Ku Klux Klan member from Texas and an Aryan Nations organizer who is also a staff writer for the California-based Jubilee newspaper, which is sponsoring the weekend event.

Rogers says he does not share the views of white supremacists and plans to speak only on a Senate resolution he authored to reaffirm state and individual rights.

“My impression of the Jubilee people is that they are a group of patriotic Americans who are working to preserve and restore individual rights and freedoms,” Rogers said, adding that he knows nothing about charges that the group promotes racism.

According to the Oregon-based watchdog group Coalition for Human Dignity, the Jubilee is the leading national publication of the Christian Identity movement.

Followers believe that white Northern European descendants are superior to other races and often refer to people of color as “mud people,” said Noah Chandler, a spokesman for the Center for Democratic Renewal, an Atlanta-based group that tracks the religious right.

Jubilee representatives did not return phone calls seeking comment Wednesday.

This will not be the first time Rogers has attended one of the group’s annual Jubilation gatherings. Two years ago, the senator spoke against gun control and environmentalists at a conference in Mariposa.

The May-June, 1992, edition of Jubilee heralded Rogers for his talk and praised him for never voting for a tax increase. The same issue carried an article describing the Los Angeles riots as “savage and senseless Negro attacks on white persons . . . and massive looting by Latinos who swarmed into shattered buildings as mad dogs attacking a helpless lamb.”

Jubilee writers also said that their conference had not turned into a rollicking hate fest, as local sheriff’s deputies apparently had feared, but was a quiet, family-oriented event.

Although the Jubilee maintained in that edition that its stance on race superiority has been overstated in local newspapers, it counts a prominent organizer of the white supremacist movement--Beam--among its staff writers.

In 1984, Beam, a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas, was ordered by a court to cease harassing Vietnamese shrimp fishermen in Galveston. Five years later, he led racist skinheads in an Aryan Nations march in Tennessee.

Critics were up in arms this week over the fact that Rogers, who has represented Republican-leaning portions of Kern, Inyo, San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties for 18 years as a legislator, would join Jubilee supporters.

“These guys are just hatemongers and it’s an absolute disgrace for a California state senator to be speaking to such a group,” said the Rev. Jerry Sloan of the Sacramento-based Project Tocsin, an organization that monitors the religious right. “The people with whom he is breaking bread may be Christian, but they are definitely also white supremacists,” he said.

Rogers, however, says he is only interested in finding supporters to back his resolution underscoring the U.S. Constitution’s 10th Amendment, which says the federal government cannot force unreasonable mandates on states.

The 66-year-old senator, who will be ousted by term limits in two years, also authored a resolution to reaffirm Californians’ right to bear arms.