Everyday reality

Didn’t you know? Society ought to discriminate.

In this video, one of the USA’s leading extremist “Christian” radio broadcasters says "It is altogether right to discriminate against homosexual behavior" before going on to urge his fellow religious extremists to “rehabilitate” the word discrimination and use it “unapologetically” because society “ought to discriminate” against gay and lesbian people. Among other things, he says there shouldn’t be any laws to protect the rights of gay and lesbian people, let alone the right to marry.

This is what we’re up against every day.

The chart below shows some of the extra financial costs we have to endure because of discrimination caused by the denial of marriage equality (embiggen to read it, or check out the source). There are hundreds of additional ways GLBT people suffer discrimination and oppression in day-to-day life, too.

But fundamentalist religionists don’t care about any of this, and not just because they couldn’t care less about facts and data. Instead, they don’t care about these social and financial costs to us because they really do think we deserve this second-class (or less…) status, as the extremist was saying in this video.

What the extremist doesn’t say this time, but has said directly or indirectly before, is something shared by all the radicals of the religious far right: They think we deserve this oppression because we won’t do as they order us to do, that is, surrender to their particular extremist brand of religion and just “stop being gay.” Because they apparently know easy it is to stop being straight, they know—they simply know—that we’re just being stubborn, so, some discrimination and oppression might make us come to our “senses” and do as we’re told.

These people are beyond reason, beyond rational arguments. Many have openly rejected GLBT family members. One leading anti-gay bigot said recently about a member of his family who has HIV/AIDS, “the wages of sin is death.” Nice people.

And that is what we’re up against. Every day.