Bigot is their name-o

Normal people aren’t bigots, they’re not the sort of people who turn their prejudices into overt action to oppress others. They may not actually like everyone, of course, but they’d never dream of trying to oppress the people they don’t like. For this reason, we can say bigots aren’t normal people.

Take for example the guy in Utah who is said to be doing a water-only hunger strike in a bizarre attempt to get his state to take unconstitutional action to stop marriage equality. It must take particularly strong anti-gay animus for someone to position himself for slow-motion suicide just because he hates the idea of loving same-gender couples getting married. Seriously.

Or take the case of a former county sheriff from Arizona who went to Utah to rile up the anti-gay bigots by advocating that law enforcement officers defy court rulings and “defend” Utah county clerks so that they can defy court orders—not on everything, of course! He only wants them to defy the courts when it comes to issuing marriage licenses to loving same-gender couples.

And, of course, there’s the duck crap I wrote about recently. I said in that post that the whole fauxrage “was only ever about publicly hating LGBT people and feeling proud and justified in doing so.” I’ve been proven right.

The rightwing claimed that they were outraged that duck guy had been “fired” (he wasn’t) merely for expressing his “Christian” beliefs. So, when former Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe alleged that he was fired because of his outspoken support for marriage equality, naturally duck guy’s supporters ran to Kluwe’s defense, right? After all, since they’re defenders of freedom of belief and expression, then they defend it in all cases, right? Oh, that’s right, freedom of belief and expression only applies to those who are anti-gay! How silly of us to think otherwise.

The far right website named after the dead perpetually grumpy far-right gadfly who founded it epitomised the extreme hypocrisy of the USA’s far right “Christian” bigots:

“What Kluwe fails to grasp, as many in today’s society often do, is that NFL teams are private organizations: as such, they can release an employee for any reason that is not contrary to the law (e.g., race) and is not contractually forbidden. Moreover, the contracts players often sign with the teams include all manner of behavioral clauses, likely including that the player’s actions on-and-off the field not reflect poorly on the team.”

The rightwing’s hypocrisy is breathtaking: Kluwe was allegedly fired for exactly the same reason that duck guy was merely suspended (not fired), but when it happened to duck guy it was because of the “homofascism” of the “gaystapo”, and when the same thing happening to Kluwe? Well, that’s perfectly fine, and just the way business is done.

What unites these incidents is anti-gay bigotry: It’s leading one guy to a starvation stunt, an ex-lawman to advocate what amounts to armed insurrection and rightwing apologists to display the most brazen hypocrisy imaginable.

Normal people are different—they’re not the sort of people who turn their prejudices into overt action to oppress others. And that’s why I say that normal people aren’t bigots: Happy, healthy well-adjusted people simply don’t build their lives around hatred of others.

I’m done tacitly going along with giving permission to bigots to be bigots. As I said in the post about duck guy, “The thing is, if you say bigoted things, claiming it’s religious belief doesn’t make it any less bigoted.” The bottom line here is simple: It’s far past time to call such bad behaviour by its proper name: They’re bigots.