Matt Barber is over at OneNewsNow today, trying to brush off the connections between extremist Christian anti-gay rhetoric like that being employed in Uganda and incidents such as the murder of Ugandan gay activist David Kato.

Liberals and homosexuals are speaking out in response to Ugandan police reports about homosexual activist David Kato being bludgeoned to death at his home in a country where government leaders have called for the death penalty against homosexuals. According to Matt Barber, director of cultural affairs for Liberty Counsel, the news fits a pattern.

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“Somewhere in the world, violence occurs, [and] liberals rush to blame conservative and Christians’ — quote — ‘incendiary rhetoric’ for the violence,” he reports. “And then later, that rhetoric is proven to be irrelevant, and the left ends up kind of playing the fool with egg all over their face.”

He says that is the case in Uganda, where police have arrested a man who lived with Kato and has confessed to murdering him for not paying for sexual favors. So Barber decides the narrative that hate and anti-homosexual rhetoric were somehow responsible for the cruel murder has crumbled around liberals.

“Once again, they have overreached to the point where they have exposed themselves for the propagandists that they are and have really damaged their credibility in the mainstream public eye,” the Liberty Counsel cultural affairs director notes.

That’s sort of pathetic. It would be less pathetic if there was really a chorus of people who agreed with Matt Barber, but really, it’s just a few anti-gay wingnuts who are rushing to cover their asses and avoid responsibility, just as it was with the spate of gay teen suicides related to bullying. You can be sure that they will never take responsibility for anything bad that happens to a gay person. They really still think that Elizabeth Vargas’s 20/20 report on Matthew Shepard’s death told “the real story.” Sad, but true.

You’ll remember that we really don’t know the full story on the Kato murder; the story the Ugandan police are telling is fascinating in that it is exactly the same “gay panic” story that the Religious Right loves to embrace in the United States.  Moreover, there is no reason to trust the police in a corrupt nation such as Uganda, especially one which has been on an anti-gay tirade for the past couple of years.

But don’t worry.  Bam Bam will continue to sleep like a baby.