The Dishonest Defense of Homophobia

I noted recently Ross Douthat's column in the New York Times that wrongly tried to defend Arizona SB 1062 and, like most who put their own religious beliefs above the civil rights of others (usually to avoid thinking for themselves and making true moral choices), Douthat made bigots out to be the real victims of same sex marriage in particular and gay rights advances in general.  A column in Salon does a terrific job of basically ripping Douthat a new one.  Here are column excerpts:

A married lesbian couple bring their children to a restaurant. The host refuses to seat them because, as he explains, interaction with gay people violates his religious beliefs. The mothers speak to the manager, who reminds the host of the restaurant’s non-discrimination policy and demands that he seat the family. Who is the victim? The mothers, who must explain to their children why their parents’ mere existence is, for some, a despicable sin? The children, who were forced to watch their parents shamed and humiliated in public?

None of the above, according to New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat: By his moral calculus, the host would be the true victim, the family the “victors,” and the hypothetical—which is far from fanciful—demonstrates not the continuing threat of discrimination in America, but, rather, the marginalization of devout Christians at the hands of bellicose pro-gay forces.

In his most recent column, Douthat strives to reframe the current debate about anti-gay discrimination (and even segregation) into one about sincere believers being brutally trampled by gay rights activists eager to bury religious freedom. It’s a failed effort, but a useful failure nonetheless.
Douthat’s column is such an effective piece of homophobic apologia that I expect many red state politicians to borrow from its playbook in the coming months and years. To make their job easier, I’ve laid out the most effective means of disguising raw hatred as religious liberty and rounding discrimination down to “dissent.”

If you’re thinking about introducing an anti-gay discrimination bill to your own state’s legislature, you should pay close attention.

Step 1: Put your tail between your legs.  Douthat’s piece is so self-pitying that he actually has to spend a paragraph explaining why he doesn’t mean to be self-pitying. This is a brilliant move. . . . This pity distracts us from the absurdity of his claims: . . . . G iven the horrifying ubiquity of LGBT workplace discrimination, the jarring lack of state and federal laws protecting gay people, and the continuing lack of marriage equality in most states, Douthat’s theory is ludicrous at best and insulting at worst. 

Step 2: Make homophobes the real victims.  Only a tiny handful of business owners have been sued under LGBT anti-discrimination laws in the minority of states that have them. Douthat, like most state legislators who have defended “religious liberty” bills, explicitly cites that infamous trio: a florist, a photographer, and a baker, who claimed their Christianity required that they deny service to gay couples. . . . . Never mind that the real victim isn’t the business owner who acted on his hatred, but the customer who suffered from his discriminatory policies. If you tilt the looking glass just right, you can reverse these roles, turning a bigot into a principled entrepreneur and a wronged minority into entitled bullies.

Step 3: Find an audience-appropriate euphemism for “discrimination.”   Douthat knows the typical Times reader is sophisticated enough to see past the hackneyed doublespeak of “religious liberty,” so he lands on a clever new euphemism for anti-gay discrimination: “dissent.” According to Douthat, the Arizona bill was just a way for “religious conservatives” to “carv[e] out protections for dissent.” . . . .   By rebranding anti-gay bigots as dissenters, Douthat transforms them from retrograde homophobes to virtuous objectors, unwilling to bend their beliefs to match public opinion.

Step 4: Dog whistle to homophobes.  How can Douthat distinguish religious homophobia from religious racism? He can’t, of course: As ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser explained, racists across America raised analogous—indeed, often nearly identical—objections to non-discrimination protections for blacks, which were definitively struck down by a near-unanimous Supreme Court in 1981. Yet Douthat scoffs at these comparisons, labeling them “mendacious and hysterical.”

By the internal logic of Douthat’s piece, homophobia is simply more defensible than racism. Nothing else could explain why denying gay customers is OK while denying black customers isn’t.

The Christofascist/GOP Ruse of Protecting "Religious Freedom"

In the wake of veto of Arizona's "turn the gays away bill" by GOP Gov. Jan Brewer, there has been a great deal of shrieking by Christofascists and pundits of the far right, the latter of which have claimed that the Arizona bill was not targeted at gays  (e.g. the National Review pushed this fairy tale) even though the original promoters of the bill admitted that they wanted to protect against gays trying to sue Christian bigots who turned them away.  The defenders of the bill also ignore the fact that outside of Arizona's largest cities which have enacted their own non-discrimination ordinances, LGBT Arizonans currently have no anti-discrimination protections whatsoever.  In short, the bill was seeking to fix a problem that did not exist across most of the state.  As for the claims that such laws are not meant to solely apply to gays in the minds of the Christofascists backing them, last year Willamette Week, a small paper in Portland, Oregon, documented the disingenuousness of such claims.  Here are article highlights that are worth remembering:

Sugar, flour, eggs and water are now munitions in America’s culture war. Or so you’d think from two Oregon bakeries that recently got national attention for declining to make cakes for same-sex weddings.

The first incident, in February, involved Gresham’s Sweet Cakes by Melissa, whose owner told a lesbian couple that “we don’t do same-sex marriages.” Earlier this month, Pam Regentin, who operates Fleur Cakes out of her home in the Hood River area, also refused to make a cake for a lesbian couple’s wedding.

Both bakeries cited their religious beliefs as the reason they would not make the cakes. Both describe themselves as Christian.

[An] Oregon statute makes it illegal for businesses to turn away customers based on race, religion or sexual orientation.

We wondered what other requests these cakemakers would decline to honor. So last week five WW reporters called these two bakeries anonymously to get price quotes for other occasions frowned upon by some Christians. Surprisingly, the people who answered the phone at each bakery were quite willing to provide baked goods for celebrations of divorces, unmarried parents, stem-cell research, non-kosher barbecues and pagan solstice parties.

We later contacted both bakeries to ask about these inconsistencies. Regentin declined to comment beyond asking whether she had been taped (she had not).

Sweet Cakes owners Melissa and Aaron Klein were upset that we “would even try to entrap a business” . . .

Baby Out of Wedlock

WW Asks - I’m shopping around for a nice baby shower cake for my friend. It’s her second baby with her boyfriend so I’m not looking for anything too big or fancy—probably enough to serve 15 to 20 people.

Sweet Cake says - “We have a sheet cake that will feed 30, or a 10-inch cake that would feed 30 people. The 10-inch cake is $50 and the sheet cake is $52. Or we have an 8-inch cake that would feed 15 for $40.”

Fleur says - Prices vary based on decoration and frosting, but a basic cake is $3 per serving.

Divorce Party

WW Asks - My friend is getting divorced and we’d like to throw her a little party to mark the start of her new life. Do you ever write messages on those—we’d want it to say “congratulations!”—and how much would it be for a cake that could serve about eight people?

Sweet Cake says - “A 10-inch is $29.99. That should probably do it....We can definitely do something like that.”

Fleur says - “The price for a 10-inch cheesecake is $36 and up. So it’ll be between $36 and $45, but you’re going to have to call in advance because my schedule for June and July is very busy.”

Pagan Solstice Party

WW Asks - I was calling to get a quote on a cake for a midsummer solstice party. My coven is celebrating on Friday, June 21. The decoration would be very simple: just a green pentagram. We’d like to pick it up sometime that afternoon, before the bonfire. It’ll be for about 30 people.

Sweet Cake says - “For 30 poeople we have a couple options... We have two kind of cakes you could have. About the diagram you want on the cake, I’m not sure how much extra that would be.”

Fleur says - Did not pick up phone or return messages. Acknowledged receiving requests by email but refused to comment.

Hypocrisy and lies - the hallmarks of today's "godly Christians."

Tea Party Nation Confirms The "Tea Party" is One and the Same as Christofascists

I have long maintained based on polls that show a roughly 85% overlap between Tea Party members and self-identified far right conservative Christians.   In fact, the cynical side of me believes that part of the rise of the Tea Party was by deliberate design as a vehicle to repackage Christofascists in a manner that would disguise their religious extremism form less informed and knowledgeable voters. Instead of wrapping themselves in the Bible and the cloak of religion, the new "Tea Party" would claim to wrap itself  in "freedom" and the United States Constitution.  No has made it clear that the Christofascists w, in the wake of Gov. Jan Brewer's veto of the religious extremist backed SB 1062, Judson Phillips, the head of Tea Party Nation, has made it perfectly clear that the Tea Party and the Christofascists are one and the same.  Here are highlights from a statement on the Tea Party Nation website attacking gays:

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has vetoed SB1062, The Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Arizona.  No one has ever accused Governor Brewer of being the most courageous Republican around. Come to think of it, the word courageous and Jan Brewer have probably never been uttered in the same sentence.

 

The left and the homosexual lobby in America went into overdrive to kill this bill.  Conservatives rallied for this bill and Governor Brewer opted for cowardice instead of courage.

Why is this bill so important and what did it mean for not only Arizona but America?  The issue can be boiled down to one word: Freedom.

A free man or woman controls their labor.  A slave has no control over their labor.  A free man or woman decides who they will work for and under what conditions.  The slave cannot.

The left and the homosexual lobby are both pushing slavery using the Orwellian concepts of “tolerance” and “inclusiveness.”

The storm rose against Arizona and Jan Brewer proved she was no Ronald Reagan.  She has an honored place in the ranks of the French Republicans.  Corporations and business interests, many of whom support far left wing causes, like Apple demanded this bill be vetoed.  Apple gives 96% of its political giving to Democrats.  Why a Republican listens to a word from Apple or lifts a finger to help them is beyond comprehension.  The NFL threatened to pull the Super Bowl from Arizona in 2015.

Someone with courage would have called their bluff.  Arizona has Jan Brewer.

The most common victims of the left wing homosexual assault on freedom have been Christian bakers and photographers. 

Note the theme of Christian persecution - the same mantra that we hear more and more from far right "Christian" hate groups that incessantly demonize and denigrate LGBT citizens.   Anyone who thinks that the Christofascists and the Tea Party are two different groups is merely deluding themselves.

 

No Country for Old Bigots

As noted yesterday, a new survey on religious belief in America shows that anti-gay religious and political beliefs are increasingly isolated among the over 65 age bracket - a group that is slowly but steadily dying off.  Moreover, the survey confirmed that anti-gay bigotry among certain religious denominations is driving nearly a third of the under 30 age bracket to walk away from organized religion (and the GOP).  The trend is for young people to be raised in anti-gay denominations and then go off to college or move out on their own and then simply cease church affiliation.  Yet despite this documented demographic change, the GOP remains fixated on pandering to the aging angry white Christofascist voter demographic.  A column in the New York Times looks at the long term insanity of this approach and the reality that anti-gay rhetoric is increasingly a loser in the public square.  Here are excerpts:

Arizona’s S.B. 1062, part of the conservative “Jim Queer” crusade to use religious liberty as means of codifying discrimination against people for their sexual identities, once again places conservatives on the wrong side of history and further marginalizes an intolerance-obsessed party during an inclusion-oriented era.

The Arizona bill, which has been copied by Republicans in several other states, would have allowed businesses to deny services to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender customers on religious grounds.

The backlash to this bill was swift and strong, and rightfully so, as Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, weighed whether to veto it, which she did on Wednesday. But, in a way, the damage to the Republican brand has already been done. The bigotry continues to coagulate. The harsh read of history draws Republicans further into disapproving resolution.

History doesn’t look kindly on those who stand against equality. Yet, that’s where conservatives have chosen to stand, much to my dismay and their detriment. 

The pace of Americans’ changing attitudes has been breathtakingly swift and shows no signs of abating. 

In fact, a report by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute produced some rather striking findings.

According to the report, not only do most religiously unaffiliated Americans now support same-sex marriage, but so do most white mainline Protestants, white Catholics, Hispanic Catholics and Jews.

Most Americans across the ideological spectrum, including even a majority of Tea Party supporters, support protecting gay men and lesbians from workplace discrimination, and most Americans believe that discrimination faced by gay people is greater than that faced by Muslims, blacks, women or Jews. The group the participants said faced the least amount of discrimination was evangelical Christians — the current campaign to portray them as an aggrieved and embattled class notwithstanding.

If young people will move away from religion over these issues, it’s not a stretch to believe that many might also move away from a political party because of them. 

[T]he courts keep striking down same-sex marriage bans. On Wednesday, another one fell when a federal judge found Texas’ ban on gay marriage to be unconstitutional.   The tide has turned. But Republicans think that they can still move against it. 

Will America, and the Republican opposition, be true to the Declaration of Independence, which states without equivocation: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”?

We are greater than our base elements. We feel — love, sorrow, a need for connection, the pains of longing. And we aspire, in our greatest hours, to justice. S.B. 1062 and the Republican preoccupation that fuels it was simply not our greatest hour.