The Christianist Goal: Sustaining Anti-Gay Stigma

As noted on this blog before, continuing DADT and barring same sex marriage are crucial to the real goal of Christianists, including the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church and the Mormon Church, maintaining anti-gay stigma. If gays are allowed to serve openly in the military, or worse yet to Christianists, marry and heave their relationships recognized, it sends a loud message that (1) LGBT citizens are normal and (2) anti-gay religious based discrimination should be subjected to harsh scrutiny. Yet another reason, of course, is because anti-gay bigotry has been such a successful tool for the professional Christians who make the Pharisees of the Bible seem most virtuous. As a result of these truths, the viciousness of the Christianists and their prostitute like minions will likely increase before society finally turns its back on their vitriol and LGBT Americans achieve full equality. A column at The Dail Beast looks at this reality and the machinations of the far right and Christianists to keep LGBT citizens stigmatized and second class citizens. Here are some highlights:
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Conservatives are normally out there urging people to fight [wars] and to marry. A conservative president launched two wars, and conservatives tried to impeach the adulterous Bill Clinton. When it comes to gays and lesbians wanting to defend their country or provide a stable, loving union, the right wing is suddenly on the other side. Why are they fighting?
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The fight is hot because gays are seeking equal access to the very social institutions, marriage and the military, that confer social approval. In America, and in most of western culture, the soldier and the householder are models of social virtue. If gays can marry and serve their country, well, "Gay is Good" as the old movement button says.
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The fight to keep gays off the standard scale of social value is just the current manifestation of the long history of categorizing them as sinners—which was (and to some extent still is) how people in the Judeo-Christian tradition talk about badness. The right knows it can't make the state punish gays as sinners, for various constitutional reasons, so it is trying to make the state deny them the closest thing it has to consecration: the sacred bonds of warriors and the sanctity of marriage.
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Good people appear in children's books. In the fight over same sex marriage in California two years ago, the antis ran repeated scary images of children learning that gay people could marry. Don't let gay people marry, the message ran. Since marriage is good, children will think gay is good.
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You wouldn't keep interracial couples out of children's books. Is there something wrong with us?"
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Regardless of what they say they're doing, that's the question—not soldiering and marrying—that the Senate Committees and the judicial panel are going to be answering in the coming days.