Saturday, December 13, 2008

Right-Wing Christians, Lies, Hypocrisy, and an Opportunity for Schadenfreude



Well, they've done it again, just when I thought they'd reached the very bottom of their hypocrisy. Now they've managed to go even lower.

About a week ago, an organization named The Becket Fund launched a vile anti-gay website with a full-page ad in the New York Times. Typically, the ad and the website are full of the kind of false information in the form of scare tactics that we have come to expect from the religious nutcases. They whine on and on about Americans who protested the civil rights of GLBT Californians being voted away. They make immensely exaggerated claim about violent mobs of gays people roaming the nation despite the meager news reports of things like bits of vandalism, the case of a notorious anti-gay activist woman's styrofoam cross being broken when she pushed herself into the middle of a peaceful demonstration, and harmless white powder being mailed to a couple of Mormon churches (even though the source could just as easily been Mormons looking to play victim games. The source of the harmless powder has never been identified, to my knowledge). Another religious nutcase, the singer Pat Boone, went crazy enough to liken the demonstrations to the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

They certainly overlooked the news reports about violence coming from their own side. The video in this link shows a woman who received a black eye from Mormons ironically whining about being victims themselves. And they certainly don't mentioned the story about the vicious beating a Prop 8 opponent received after doing nothing but flipping off a house with a Yes on Prop 8 sign or any of the other stories in the news lately. They also "forgot" to mention recent statistics showing that anti-gay hate crime has been increasing over the last 2 years.

Anyway, one of the people who put signatures on the ad is a guy named Richard Cizik. At the time of the ad he was Vice President for Governmental Affairs of the National Association of Evangelists. Remember that for later.

The nutcases were especially outraged over the resignations of a California theater director and a California restaurant manager who resigned after being exposed as having made financial contributions to the campaign of lies about Calfornia GLBTs during the campaign to vote away their civil rights. The exposures led to boycotts, and thus the resignations.

But wait ... aren't these the same people who have boycotted everything from Disney to McDonald's to Ford Motor Company?

And now ... the Schadenfreude Opportunity

Just the other day we learned that Richard Cizik (remember that name? One of the people who put a signature on the anti-gay ad complaining about a couple anti-gay people resigning from jobs?) was booted out of the National Association of Evangelicals because he had the gall to say on a radio show that he was evolving on the subject of gay marriage and no longer has an objection to civil unions, although he's certainly still opposed to gay marriage. Well Dobson and the gang seized the moment to demand he be fired. (They've been after him for awhile anyway because he happens to be concerned about the enviroment, and they certainly cannot put up with anyone who doesn't approve of raping and pillaging the earth.)

I have just one word of advice. The next time you run across someone getting in bed with control-freak Mormons about stripping GLBT citizens of their civil rights, just remind them what Mormon beliefs about marriage consist of.