New Insanity from the "Godly Folk" - the Gay Muslim Conspiracy

Seemingly mentally disturbed David Lapin

Only in the GOP base and in particular in the "family values" organizations is it possible for someone who needs a serious mental health intervention to become a "star" - e.g., Sarah Palin - or lead spokesman.  How else to explain Family Research Council's David Lapin who claims that liberals are sexually attracted to the "masculinity" of Islamic extremists.  Seriously, this man needs a straight jacket and padded cell!  One truly has to wonder (i) how someone gets this crazy in the first place, and (ii) how they are allowed to spew such batshitery to national media outlets. A piece in Crooks and Liars looks at Lapin's lunacy and the larger issue of the insanity of the far right:

[R]eligious right extremist Rabbi David Lapin opined this week that liberals are sexually attracted to the "masculinity" of Islamic extremists. Via Right Wing Watch: 

There are countless studies showing that feminine-type behavior produces an excess of estrogen in men and vice versa. Essentially, the left has fallen in love with the masculinity of Islam…Today, after a 30- or 40-year epidemic of leftism that has swept its sordid stain across America, we've become much more feminized and we are attracted to the masculine strength and brutality of Islam. This is the girl in the high school being attracted to the bad, tough guy and that's really what's happening. 

Remember just the other day when I half-jokingly wrote about right wing conspiracy theories that connect marriage equality issues with Islamic extremism? The humor in that piece was that I used the actual words of actual wingnuts to show that this is how they actually think. Rabbi Lapin is not an outlier, he's expressing a widely-held view on the right. It doesn't matter that they have no evidence to support it; as with the president's supposed Kenyan birth certificate, belief is the only evidence such people need.

Because Christianity no longer represents the dominant moral force in American politics, right wing culture warriors explain the changing American cultural landscape to themselves as a sinister, secret plot. American military power not only failed to end Islamic extremism, but seems to have made it orders of magnitude worse, so the right wing mind searches for an explanation which blames their ideological enemies. This process of rationalization is far more palatable to their conscious minds than a potential revision of their violent theology would be, or than it would be to admit their bigoted world-view has deterred young people from religion altogether. Just look at Dick Cheney.

The trick, as Lapin understands, is to convince yourself and others that the liberals are the real fanatics. If the liberals seem determined to treat Muslim, Christian, and Judaic radicals as mirror-images of each other rather than choose between their various destructive and homophobic visions, it's merely further proof that liberals are secretly gay-attracted to the other side's violence.

One can never admit that conservative reactionary forces are the bane of a free society - or that liberal religious movements, such as those which hold gay weddings, are vitalizing forces in a free society. That conclusion requires hard work, contrition, and a diminution of one's ego as inflated by a sense of godly mission. It's much easier to answer unwelcome intrusions of reality by impressing your belief-system on the young and unwilling with force, again using your god as the excuse to do so, while rationalizing all contradictory evidence under the rubric of ‘belief.'