The worldview of wingnuts like Porno Pete and Linda Harvey is such elaborately constructed nonsense that they can’t simply accept the fact that they don’t speak for the average Christian, and that millions of Christians are supportive of LGBT people. Instead, in the following conversation, Porno Pete worries that gay activists are “stealing Christianity,” as if Porno Pete owned it in the first place. Listen:
The truth, of course, is much simpler. As I explained a few days back, they’re not actually worried that Christianity is under attack, but rather that their bigotry, which they couch in religious terms, has become socially unacceptable. They use the same rhetoric in their war on LGBT people that segregationists used, because their movements are deeply related. Indeed, many of the lions of the evangelical/Moral Majority movement made their names as racists. They try to pretend this never happened, but their history is what it is. And, just as extreme acts of racism are socially unacceptable — though the Right continues to propagate it in many ways — anti-gay bigotry such as that expressed by Porno Pete and Linda Harvey will, over the next several years, become unspeakable in polite company. When an elderly Porno Pete says something anti-gay at the Thanksgiving table, his younger relatives will roll their eyes and chide him for being so bigoted, just as some of today’s youngsters have to chide their grandparents for saying racist things. And the thing that kills Linda and Porno Pete is that Christians are moving toward full acceptance at an alarming pace, and they’re doing it on their own. As I explained in the piece linked above, no church will ever be forced to perform a same-sex wedding, but many of those currently opposed will end up performing them willingly. That’s the future. That’s why wingnuts are scrambling to pass BS “religious freedom” laws. They’re trying to protect their bigotry, not their religion. It’s a losing fight, of course, but it’s the only one they know.
[h/t Right Wing Watch]
