They really need to grow up

The CNN video above is of Mike Huckabee, potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate, making a dick of himself—as he tends to do rather a lot—by saying stupid things about gay people (yet again). It’s part of a larger pattern, and I feel a rant coming on.

In the video, the Huckster said his opposition to marriage equality isn’t “just a political issue”, its’ a “biblical” issue. He then said that asking him, as a fundamentalist “Christian”, to support marriage equality was “like asking someone who’s Jewish to start serving bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli.” Say, what?!

This particularly boneheaded comment led one person to ask the Huckster on ThinkProgress’ Facebook post, “…and when you ask the Jew to eat the bacon and he declines, does he insist that you not eat the bacon?” Fair point. NO ONE cares in the least whether the Huckster supports marriage equality or not—his approval is not needed and his support (or not) is irrelevant. But neither does he get to dictate to loving same-gender couples that they can’t get married just because his particular subset of Christianity doesn’t like it. And, by the way, there are plenty of Christians who DO support marriage equality, just as there are plenty of Jews who’d have no problem selling “bacon-wrapped shrimp”; the Huckster always assumes that all religious people are all far-right fundamentalists like him.

This pompous superciliousness among far-right “Christian” extremists is becoming quite common. In a recent “Stoplight” propaganda video from a rightwing “Christian” professional activist organisation called Focus on Your Own Damn Family (or something like that), the host declared that as a “conservative” he was opposed to marriage equality, “…especially now that we all can see that the goal has always been to use the force of government to silence Christian beliefs about morality.” Say, what?!

I hate to break it to him, but the goal in enacting marriage equality has never been about anything other than the freedom to marry for same-gender couples. As Jeremy Hooper put it on his site, Good As You:

Nearly Twelve years ago (and nearly six years ago, under law), I pledged a lifetime to one man for any number of reasons. I can assure you that pissing off Stuart Shepard and his Focus on the Family employers was not even kind of on my radar. In fact, neither Mr. Shepard nor Focus are ever on my radar, outside of my work challenging their constant onslaughts against my freedoms as an American taxpayer.

To complete today’s trifecta of crazy, there’s good ol’ reliable Tony Perkins, head bigot at the professional anti-gay hate group, “Family” Research [sic] Council [LOL]. Tony declared that LGBT people are persecuting “Christians” by posting photos of our lives on Facebook—yes, seriously!!

Tony was responding to a caller to his radio show who claimed that he’d seen a photo of “two naked guys sitting on each other”, but that’s a transparent lie because Facebook doesn't allow any nudity whatsoever (they don’t even permit photos of mothers breastfeeding their infants). Maybe he didn’t mean “naked” literally, but if that’s the case his bearing false witness kind of gives a lie to his claim of having complained “in a nice, respectful, Christian way.” Do these people not know they can “unfriend” someone on Facebook?!

Tony joined in the lying, however, by claiming that ALL LGBT people were “haters” who are “projecting”. But Tony himself did some high-grade projecting when he pretended that it was all LGBT people, not merely ONE mentally disturbed man, who took a gun into their corporate headquarters:

We’ve had them come into our building with guns, shooting, to try to kill us. We harbor no bitterness in our hearts toward them, which is something they can’t understand. They want to project and that’s why they like to call us haters and so on and so forth, but they’re projecting. [emphasis added]

The Huckster, Stu and Tone are all so up themselves that they that really, truly believe that the entire world revolves around them and their fellow travellers on the USA’s extreme right. The reality is that these people are arrogant and hubristic authoritarians who want to force their particular religious political ideology onto everyone else, but, much to their extreme dismay, normal people couldn’t possibly care less about them.

So, when we demand civil marriage equality, we absolutely don’t care whether far-right “Christians” approve or not, and there’s absolutely no way we ever think of them for even one millisecond when we’re getting a legal civil marriage. And, if those poor delicate flowers on the extreme right don’t like seeing perfectly ordinary Facebook photos of us living our lives—exactly the same sort of photos as they themselves post—well, too damn bad!

The fact is, disagreeing with them is not oppressing them, posting photos on Facebook is not persecuting them, and when we win the exact same freedom and liberty that they have—to marry, and to be free from discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodation—we are not diminishing their freedom and liberty, we're expanding it for us all.

They really need to grow up and learn that the world doesn’t revolve around them.