That man, that failure

I’m not going to say much of anything about the elderly hate merchant who just died. It’s clearly not out of respect for him or his family, but because he’s not worthy of attention.

The truth is, I almost pity him: Imagine living a whole life built on nothing but hatred and causing division, and then dying a despised person. If this was all because he lived his life suffering from profound mental illness that was never treated, that IS a shame. If that’s not the case, how sad that it looks as if it was the case.

But that doesn’t change the simple reality that he died as he lived: A complete irrelevance. Despite all the pain and suffering he inflicted on innocent people through his political stunts in his long history, he accomplished absolutely nothing. He died a complete and utter failure, despised by people all over the political spectrum.

He wasn’t irrelevant merely because he was an utter failure, but because he wasn’t in any way unique: The dead guy merely said out loud what the anti-gay industry thinks. While the activists in the anti-gay industry have long tried to wrap their bigotry in a cloak of respectability (the latest one called “religious freedom”), they have in their more honest moments admitted that they want gay people locked up, too. And, let’s be real here: What’s their entire reason for being if not to take away the civil and human rights of LGBT people? The dead guy crudely, offensively and sickeningly demanded out loud what the professional anti-gay industry won’t say out loud but nevertheless is trying to achieve.

So, a bad man is dead, and that’s a good thing. I’ll certainly never forgive what he did in life, but, like everyone else, I’ll easily forget him. That’s just another indicator of what a complete failure he was.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Update: Rachel Maddow did a sort of anti-obituary (link goes to YouTube), and, like me, she also pointedly didn’t mention the dead guy’s name. I don’t know what her reason was, but mine was that I think that among the most insulting things one can do is to deliberately ignore the name of a dead person, as if they never existed. As a bonus, this post also won’t show up in searches.

Rachel makes the point that by being so truly vile and offensive, the dead guy actually helped the cause of gay rights. Silver lining, that. It’s also the reason some on the radical right thought the cult must have been a liberal fake-out. I think they were just embarrassed to see someone say out loud what they said more privately, and to put a public face on anti-gay religious bigotry so that everyone could see it for what it is.