In case you hadn’t heard by now — and I assume most of my readers have — gay marriage is suddenly legal in a number of states (WebCite cached article). Naturally, this has brought the insanity out of the Religious Right, who just can’t tolerate the idea that gays should actually be allowed to live normal lives. I can hardly hope to catalog all the wingnutty craziness that has, and will, erupt from them over it. That would be impossible. Only Google has a data center with enough storage for that!
But I can report on one particular paranoiac reaction that defies history. It comes from the Bible Belt (er, Bobble Bay-elt) state of North Carolina; the Asheville Citizen-Times reports on some GOP functionaries’ reaction to a gay-pride flag flying over City Hall (cached):
A decision allowing that a two-story rainbow flag be flown at City Hall had more to do with supporting civil rights than jumping into political conflict over same-sex marriage, Mayor Esther Manheimer said Friday.…
Former City Councilman Carl Mumpower and Chad Nesbitt, a former chairman of the Buncombe County GOP, said council violated state open meetings law by not holding vote during an official meeting in public.…
Nesbitt and Mumpower in their statement included a depiction of a Nazi flag flying from City Hall.
“I am equating their methods with the Nazi movement,” Mumpower said. “They are indifferent to the rule of law and indifferent to the vote of the people. And that’s Adolph Hitler all over again in a different disguise.”
This is where I find it necessary to call a big fucking time out.
First, if the best these sanctimoniously-enraged good ol’ boys can come up with is to trot out an old reductio ad Hitlerum, their argument was over as soon as it began. The Right bellowing appeals to Hitler and the Nazis every time they’re confronted by something they don’t like, is exceedingly childish, and it’s long since gotten old. These guys desperately need new material — and fast.
Second, gay rights advocates absofuckinglutely are not Nazis, no matter how much one hates them. It’s not hard to understand why this is the case. It’s because, as I’ve blogged before, details matter. They have not taken over the federal government and then: 1) outlawed all other political parties; 2) nationalized state governments; 3) deployed their own militia out to control the streets; 4) abolished labor unions; or 5) arrested their opponents en masse and imprisoned them in concentration camps … just to name a few of the specific things the Third Reich did.
Third, Hitler and his minions in the Nazi party were certainly not friendly to gays. There is no goddamn fucking way they’d ever have flown a gay-pride flag over anything. Quite the opposite, they despised gays in every possible way! Gays were among those whom they first rounded up and imprisoned, then exterminated (along with Jews, Dom/Romani, and other minorities). One of the pretenses for Hitler killing Ernst Röhm, his head of the SA (i.e. the Sturmabteilung or “brownshirts”), was that he was gay. To suggest the Nazis might have done anything in support of gays, is contra-factual and idiotic.
Because of all this, I’m placing Mumpower and Nesbitt in my “lying liars for Jesus” club. I’m sure they’ll be happy to end up there, surrounded by lots of their fellow Christofascists who likewise have hurled ad Hitlerums around in ridiculous and juvenile fashion.
I’ve said it before and will say it again: I get it. Really. Honest, I do. I get that these hyperreligious nutcases don’t like gays. They don’t want to treat gays like human beings. They’d much rather not even know that gays exist. Gays creep them out. I understand that. I truly do. But … I don’t fucking care! The cold fact is that gays exist, they are human beings just like everyone else, and it’s fucking long past time for the world to accept it. These Religious Rightists don’t have to like it, and I doubt they ever will — but they do have to get over it and move on with their lives, fercryinoutloud. Just knock off the lying bullshit already.
Photo credit: PsiCop, based on original from quitor.com.
Hat tip: Raw Story.
