Calling them what they are

Radical right christianists pose a problem for rational people: If we call them what they are—hate-filled bigots—they spin that as an attack on all religion. If we document their extreme hatred of GLBT people, they spin that as an attack on voters they’ve hoodwinked into supporting them at the ballot box. Put another way, they can get away with lying about, slandering and defaming GLBT people with giddy abandon and there are no consequences, but the moment rational people push back and correctly point out these people are motivated only by pure hatred, then somehow we’re making them “victims”.

This must stop.

I have absolutely no patience with religious fundamentalists of any kind because their blind religious beliefs lead them to lie, slander and defame in the self-righteous certainty that those sins are excusable in their promotion of their religious “truth”—the end justifies the means. That same certainty has led some of them to violence, including extreme violence, and it’s dishonest not to say so.

Today I read how the host of a radio show of the leading anti-gay hate group American “Family” Association used his radio show to call for imprisoning gay people. In a letter to someone who disagreed with him, he declared:

“The bottom line here is that, biblically, those ‘who practice homosexuality’ should come under the purview of the law just as much as those who take people captive in order to sell them into slavery.”

Like most fundamentalists, he twists and convolutes his holy book to make it say what he wants it to so it’ll support his particular political agenda. The specific section he’s quoting doesn’t say anything like what he’s claiming, of course, not that he’d care about that. Without any appreciation for irony, he tells the person, “I trust your confidence in Scripture is not selective.”

What his picking, choosing and re-writing of the bible lead him to propose is:

“We impose the same sanctions on those who engage in homosexual behavior as we do on those who engage in intravenous drug abuse… If you believe that what drug abusers need is to go into an effective detox program, then we should likewise put active homosexuals through an effective reparative therapy program.”

“Reparative therapy” is a scam radical right christianists run, making millions of dollars off the misery of gay people who are miserable precisely because of the message of hate these people promote. There’s absolutely no scientific evidence that such “therapy” does anything but cause harm—even sometimes driving the victim to suicide.

I’m well aware that these hate-mongers say things like this to raise money, as well as to rile up their political base. They even count on intemperate words from the centre-left so they can use them to claim to be “victims” so they can raise even more money. But that doesn’t mean they don’t mean it: These are the same folks behind Uganda’s “kill the gays” bill and who want similar laws in other countries—including the United States.

So when some prominent far-right religious nutcase calls for gay people to be thrown into prison for being gay and demands that they be forced into some sort of fundamentalist torture programme, good people—people of conscience—absolutely must stand up to them and call them what they are: Hate-filled bigots.