Cloaking device

A couple days ago, I talked about how radical right christianists claiming to be “victims” of gay people is stupid and pathetic on its face: They don’t suffer the beatings, murders, arson and other violent crimes that gay people do every day—often in the name of someone’s religion. Nevertheless, the anti-gay industry is desperately trying to convince normal people that the lie of “victimhood” is true.

One of the largest, most-read far right christianist websites published the results of what they call a “scientific telephone survey”. The loaded questions of the extremely dodgy survey supposedly found that, “almost half of Americans believe that Christians in the United States are being persecuted by homosexual ‘marriage’ advocates….”

Scream, scream, scream! Run! Run and scream! Seriously, the poll is laughably silly to normal people, but religious extremists take it as—ahem!—gospel, precisely because it backs up their existing prejudices.

They also say that "more people than not” oppose DOMA repeal, a claim that cannot be supported by their results (again, given their dodgy question wording), Guess what? They also say there’s an ideological divide over whether people are born gay (as id we’d never have known otherwise).

Add it all up, and the truth and representativeness of their survey is extremely suspicious—doubtful, even. Still, there’s a reason they did a survey to get the results they wanted, something beyond merely reinforcing the prejudices of their millions of readers.

It may seem odd that people who don’t believe in evolution, who promote conspiracy theories and who say climate change is a hoax would turn to science to provide support for their far right religious ideology. But the entire purpose of the survey is to provide a cloak to hide their hatred, a veneer of respectability for their prejudice and bigotry, and a justification for their lies. The results of this survey will be repeated endlessly throughout the rightwing—and not just among the truly loony right, but also in the mainstream of conservatism—as “proof” of their self-proclaimed and entirely imaginary victimhood.

They are—as I have said and will say repeatedly—not victims of anything, except their own arrogance. The proof is overwhelming, and no matter how many bogus surveys they do, they can’t change that simple fact.