Holy Terror: Lies the Christian Right Tells to Deny Gay Equality

Mel White has a new book out that looks at the tactics and agenda of the Christianists against LGBT citizens.  It is chilling in many respects, not the least of which is that the "godly Christian" crowd believes that deliberately lying is perfectly fine so long as the lies accomplish the goal of keeping LGBT Americans inferior and treated as less than full citizens.  Part of White's premise is that dialogue with anti-gay leaders is a waste of time since they are either "true believers" who believe the cherry picked biblical arguments against gays or because they are using the anti-gay crowd to line their own pockets or to trick simpletons into voting against their own economic interests.   Either way, it is important for members of the LGBT community and our allies to recognize the clear and present danger that Christianists represent to LGBT rights and lives.   Here are highlights from an interview of White by Religion Dispatches:

White spoke recently with Religion Dispatches about the release of his newest book, Holy Terror: Lies the Christian Right Tells Us to Deny Gay Equality, and the ongoing battle between the religious right and the LGBT community.

Candace Chellew-Hodge: You start your book with a litany of religious right characters who have either laid the groundwork for the battle against LGBT rights, or who are still warriors in this ongoing battle.  .  .  .  .   but why did this ever become a war?
Mel White: It really was a conscious declaration of war for various reasons, including fundraising, on a community for whom it caused this great suffering and death. Even the religious right will not admit that its rhetoric leads to all kinds of horrors. It really was launching a war and this is the way they were going to fight it and they’re fighting it that way now, so let’s look at it again and see what we ought to do.

I really believe that terrorism gets its way through violence or threats of violence. Here the Southern Baptists gathered recently to say that homosexuality is a sickness, that our relationships are sinful and we have 16 million Americans under the influence of that crowd and nobody confronts it.

You outline a secret summit in 1994 at the Glen Eyrie conference center in Colorado Springs, Colorado where 55 fundamentalist Christians gathered to discuss the consequences of the “militant homosexual agenda.” What happened there?
I compare it to the Nazis creating a solution for the Jews. These guys literally crafted a solution to the homosexual problem. The record of that conference, which was very secretive, wasn’t even released to the press. Somebody recorded it and it ended up at Tufts University library and a couple of lesbians found it there.

So we uncovered this radical piece of history where leaders from the Christian Right from all over the country gathered to decide the plan against gays and lesbians and that plan is still in place.  That plan was simply to release misinformation to create fear and then raise money to mobilize volunteers and create a backlash among the American people that would keep LGBT people from getting rights and protections.

At the heart of it, though, isn’t it really about protecting their wealth and raising money on the back of the LGBT community?
Behind the Koch brothers and the WalMart folks and the Chic-fil-A’s—these guys who are funding the religious right, that’s their goal—to protect their money from being too generous with the poor.

We laughed at these guys until suddenly in 2006, bam, they win. And they could win again. We thought with the election of Obama they were gone, the religious right had been defeated—but now they’re back in full force as the Tea Party.

They don’t use bombs and bullets to enforce their views, but they use this fear of God. They threaten that God will send people to hell—what’s more violent than that? They have violence on their side, too. It’s the fear of God’s violence, so God does the dirty work.

Earlier this year, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution saying gay rights are not civil rights and within that resolution they say they don’t want any gay bashing or violence to come to LGBT people. Do they really not understand that passing these types of resolutions is gay bashing?
The trouble is I don’t think a lot of our people get it. They think religion has a right to believe what they want to believe and we don’t have any right to change religious opinions. But, I say, c’mon folks, this is the source of the violence and we’d better face it.

So, what’s the solution? How do we fight them and still keep our religion?
There’s only one solution, and that’s to come out. Until people know us for who we are they will be against us. But, once they know who we are and they know enough of us, then they’ll simply turn against the Karl Roves of this country and say, “This is bullshit.” That’s happening, but we’re just hoping it happens fast enough.

[F]orget the debates and dialogues. Fundamentalists don’t listen to dialogues. As I say in the book, “To play along with this game of studying, debating, and discussing if we are worthy of our civil rights is to help postpone justice and support the structures of religion-based bigotry.”

 The troubling truth is that the Christianists are cruel and vicious enemies - and not just to gays.  All too often these same self-congratulatory monsters hate blacks and other minorities with almost equal passion.  They are an enemy that needs to be recognized and treated as such.  Their lies and hypocrisy and greed when relevant needs to be exposed,  They are a blight on America and a clear and present danger to the promises of the Constitution for all citizens.