This is pretty funny, even by the standards of whiny conservative rants against liberals. Herman Cain argued in a column a while back that it was the liberals who killed Jesus. Also, Jesus, who fed the poor and whatnot, was the world’s greatest conservative:

He helped the poor without one government program. He healed the sick without a government health care system. He feed the hungry without food stamps.

[...]

For three years He was unemployed, and never collected an unemployment check.

I think a lot of Christian theologians would take exception to the idea that Jesus was, ahem, “unemployed.”

The liberal court found Him guilty of false offences and sentenced Him to death, all because He changed the hearts and minds of men with an army of 12.

Great, the liberals killed Jesus. Wait, being sentenced to death on false charges is a “liberal” thing? Rick Perry would beg to differ, I think!

[h/t bernardpliers and Joe]

There’s going to be a lot of talk in the coming days about the new conservative victimhood meme — oh you haven’t heard it?  Conservatives are the new bullying victims!  You see, conservatives are now having to fight for their rights to employment and housing, and they face a hard road coming out as conservatives:  some kids are bullied so much for being conservative that they end up taking their own lives; others are rejected by their families and kicked out to live on the streets.  Moreover, hate crimes against conservatives are now the most common kind of hate crime, which is bit confusing for them, as they oppose hate crimes legislation.

Of course, all of the above is laughable.  No gay person, activist or not, has ever tried to take any fundamental right away from any conservative Christian person.  There is a debate to be had, surely, over whether fundamentalists actually understand where their rights end and where the rest of the nation’s citizens’ begin, but I don’t want to have it right now.

Instead, I want to spotlight the story of Iowa teen Ben Alley, who just graduated high school with a 3.25 GPA and is on his way to the University of Iowa.  You see, Ben had the misfortune of being born to a Southern Baptist and his wife, who kicked him out onto the street when they found out he was gay:

Ben Alley misses his parents. He’s 18 and just graduated from East Marshall High School in Le Grand, with scholarships to almost cover his costs at the University of Iowa. It’s a time for open houses and pride. But he won’t be getting that from his once-close family — the Southern Baptist minister father and the mother who home-schooled him early on.

They’re not dead; he’s dead to them. In sophomore year, Ben informed his parents that he is gay. They informed him he wouldn’t be coming home after school the next day — or ever again.

[...]

Ben’s is actually two stories in one. The first is about a kid rejected, homeless and compelled to live independently at 16, requiring him to take a late shift job at Walmart to help cover costs. That meant most nights he didn’t start homework until 10:30. It’s about a young man raised in a home where being gay was considered “right up there with being a child molester.” At age 10 he was told by his mom that he didn’t deserve to live anymore, after she caught him experimenting with a boy the same age. Later, when he fought depression, counselors told Ben, “You’ve been taught to hate everything you are.”

Yeah. But please, let’s have this conversation about fundamentalist Christians as bullying victims. It should be entertaining.

It turns out it already exists!  Nick Kristof explains in the New York Times:

With Tea Party conservatives and many Republicans balking at raising the debt ceiling, let me offer them an example of a nation that lives up to their ideals.

It has among the lowest tax burdens of any major country: fewer than 2 percent of the people pay any taxes. Government is limited, so that burdensome regulations never kill jobs.

This society embraces traditional religious values and a conservative sensibility. Nobody minds school prayer, same-sex marriage isn’t imaginable, and criminals are never coddled.

The budget priority is a strong military, the nation’s most respected institution. When generals decide on a policy for, say, Afghanistan, politicians defer to them. Citizens are deeply patriotic, and nobody burns flags.

So what is this Republican Eden, this Utopia? Why, it’s Pakistan.

I always suggest that the anti-gay wingnuts we go up against would be much happier in Iran, but maybe Pakistan is more appropriate. As usual, they’ll have to give up basically nothing, except that they won’t have to occasionally mention Jesus in order to remind people how Christian they are.

Of course, Nick reminds us that we’re not actually in danger of becoming Pakistan:

The United States is, of course, in no danger of actually becoming Pakistan, any more than we’re going to become Sweden at the other extreme. But as America has become more unequal, as we cut off government lifelines to the neediest Americans, as half of states plan to cut spending on higher education this year, let’s be clear about our direction — and about the turnaround that a Republican budget victory would represent.

Eh, yeah, the direction would be “toward Pakistan or some other Third World nation.” But indeed, heaven forbid we would aspire to become more like Sweden at “the other extreme.” I mean, it’s only one of the happiest nations on the planet. Sucks to be them.

[h/t Anne Laurie @ Balloon Juice]

I haven’t had anything to say about the non-scandal that is “Wiener-gate.”  [Ugh, if you don't know what I'm talking about, A. It involves Andrew Breitbart and B. Go to Gawker or something, because I'm not re-explaining it.]  Basically, a semi-lewd picture of a clothed erect penis was sent from Rep. Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account, he claims it was hacked, and it looks like one of Breitbart’s own hacks may have been the hacker.

But what does Dan Blatt at Gay Patriot think about it?  Uhhh…well, he says that if Weiner DID tweet the wiener:

Look, Congressmen are human. They have the same weaknesses, the same strengths, as the rest of us. If Weiner’s twitter wasn’t hacked, Mr Weiner did something a lot of men do when they’re lonely and longing for human connection.

What?! They tweet pictures of their genitals to people they don’t know on Twitter? What?! Normal Behavior, according to Dan Blatt!

Oh my lord…

Conservatives can never accept the simple explanation for anything.  For instance, they don’t tend to do well with the reality that television is geared toward certain audiences because those audiences are the most common audiences for, ahem, television, and also there’s a whole advertising component involved, as well.  No, instead it is a liberal Hollywood conspiracy to hurt wingnuts’ fee fees.  Enter Ben Shapiro, a freshly-picked wingnut who somehow managed to make it through Harvard Law.  Those are always the best wingnuts — the ones who have been exposed to the reality of gay people and whatnot, and yet still cling to their bitterness and bigotry.  Benjamin has a new book out called My Teevee Is Making Fun of Me, Mom! Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How The Left Took Over Your TV and he’s doing interviews with friendly wingnut organizations in order to tell his story of shame and victimization at the hands of Ross and Rachel.  He interviewed lots of people for this book, by using “liberal code words” to fool them!

Believe it or not, it was as simple as that. People in Hollywood love talking about themselves for the most part, and many were very generous with their time. I approached them and told them exactly who I was: my name, my latest book, my Harvard Law credentials, and what this book was about. I also told them I was profiling the biggest names in Hollywood over the last 50 years. I assume that many of them bought into that last part – people in Hollywood aren’t exactly known for their humility. They must have assumed that with a name like Shapiro and a Harvard Law credential, there was no need to Google; I would have to be a leftist. When I spoke with them, I used certain liberal code words – “social justice,” “tolerance,” “diversity.” And they spoke freely with me, with permission to tape.

Right, and he had to do that because

Everyone knows that people in Hollywood despise traditional conservatives. They think we’re morons, bigots, and Neanderthals.

Okay, so first of all? The kid admits in the interview that his parents actually work in the industry, so for him to be portraying himself as some “outsider tradishnul conservative” seems to be a talking appoint to appeal to morons, bigots and Neanderthals. Cynical, Benjamin, cynical.

Anyway, he whines a bit about his writing being rejected in Hollywood [again due to a conspiracy against conservatives and not possibly because he's not that good], and then gets to the really good part, about the gargantuan conspiracy of primetime television, which is to make fun of conservatives:

Unlike MSNBC, though, the liberal content we see on primetime television and in daytime soaps is typically hidden in plot and character. That makes it far more manipulative and dangerous. It makes the political personal. We don’t want to oppose the politics of those we like, and television characters are like friends. They don’t bug us openly about politics, they just happen to have abortions, bear children out of wedlock, engage in gay marriage, preach about environmentalism, hate Rush Limbaugh, and make fun of religious people.

Uh huh. First of all? Abortion is not seen on television hardly at all.  Secondly, bearing children out of wedlock is definitely not a liberal value, as teen pregnancy rates are much, much higher in red, “tradishnul values” states.  Perhaps the lack of sex education contributes to this?  And, well, the second Rush Limbaugh stops being a mockery of himself, people will stop making fun of him.  As for gay people on television, well, a couple of things about that:

1.  Gay people actually exist!  So to have us on television is simply a representation of that reality!

2.  I’d probably concede that Hollywood is helping people understand gay people a little bit better, and it makes sense, since without gay people, there wouldn’t be a Hollywood.  There wouldn’t be much in the way of artistic entertainment in general.  Hell, even the Christian music industry is full of [closeted] gay people. So the fact that they’re starting to really portray us in a positive light, and the fact that entertainers are coming out of the closet more and more is a net positive, for everyone.

But Ben’s biggest problem isn’t with shows like Will & Grace, which was obviously super-lotsa-gay, but more with the more subversive shows like Friends:

The subtle ones are the ones that are the most problematic on a moral level. Look at Friends. Great show. Well-written. Well-acted. Funny. Bet you didn’t think it was political per se. But not only did the show feature a lesbian wedding during its first season, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and on-screen fights over condoms, the show promoted the substitution of friends for family as moral guides and sources of responsibility.

Uh huh. Oh, and also, he’s upset that the creator of the show cast Newt Gingrich’s half-sister [Newt, that paragon of moral virtue] as the preacher for the lesbian wedding, which you’ve got to admit, was pretty funny.

Anyway, so what is Ben’s solution? Well, first of all, you have to understand what the conspiracy is:

The biggest scam in American business history is that the 18-49 crowd is more valuable to advertisers than people of other ages. Hollywood has pushed this myth because they prefer to produce liberal programming – and young people like liberal programming.

Yes, because what advertisers REALLY want is the nursing home crowd. They go along with Hollywood’s fake demographics because Hollywood is JUST THAT POWERFUL. But anyway, now that you know the conspiracy, he asserts, I suppose with a straight face:

Conservatives must enter the culture war.

Yes! Because they totally aren’t already there, grubbing everything up with their over-represented paws! Um, let me check my history, but the very idea of a “culture war” was, indeed, created by The Right.  I mean, bloody hell.

But I hate the idea of little Ben Shapiro running around with bushy eyebrows and hurt feelings, so I propose that America should get a true, primetime drama series about a typical American conservative family.  I haven’t come up with a title yet, but here’s the premise:

Bill and Suzy are just a normal, Evangelical conservative family in, I dunno, let’s say Minnesota.  Bill is an elder at the church and Suzy home-schools the kids.  After everybody is asleep at night, Bill sneaks down to his study and looks at gay porn and posts ads on gay dating sites for illicit meet-ups in public parks.  He does not use face pics.  Suzy misses the intimacy she used to have with her husband, but she finds solace in her children, and also pharmaceuticals.  Lots and lots of pharmaceuticals.  Joey is their sixteen year old son.  When his parents catch him in Season 2 locked in his room secretly watching “It Gets Better” videos on his iPhone, they send him to a gay re-education camp, where he is molested by his counselor.  Their seventeen year old daughter Margaret becomes a major plot point in Season 3 when she, armed with absolutely no real, useful knowledge on sex besides “a true lady saves her flower,” becomes pregnant by the similarly uneducated Mark, who lives down the street and goes to the same church.  Ashamed that their daughter is now “one of those girls,” they spirit her away to a neighboring town so that they may quietly have the pregnancy “taken care of,” so that they don’t have to feel the scorn of their church friends.  They would go to the abortion clinic in their town, but they would be recognized, because they protest there every Saturday.  In Season 4, Joey attempts suicide, worried that he’s never going to get out of the hell that is his fundamentalist existence, and in Season 5, Suzy, fed up and desperate, begins having an affair with Maria, another similarly situated housewife.

Does this sound good?  If you’re a Hollywood producer and you think this has potential, get in touch with me, because I really want to see a normal, typical conservative family on teevee.  My straight brother and I will write it.  I think it has real potential!

Waiting by the phone!

[h/t Roy Edroso]

Oh, golly, it’s not just the gay kids:

Suicide attempts by gay teens — and even straight kids — are more common in politically conservative areas where schools don’t have programs supporting gay rights, a study involving nearly 32,000 high school students found.

Those factors raised the odds and were a substantial influence on suicide attempts even when known risk contributors like depression and being bullied were considered, said study author Mark Hatzenbuehler, a Columbia University psychologist and researcher.

His study found a higher rate of suicide attempts even among kids who weren’t bullied or depressed when they lived in counties less supportive of gays and with relatively few Democrats. A high proportion of Democrats was a measure used as a proxy for a more liberal environment.

[...]

“Is it surprising? No. Is it important? Yes,” said Dr. Robert Blum of Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health.

A dirty little secret about the Religious Right’s opposition to inclusive anti-bullying policies, and gay rights in general, is that they’re not just hurting gay kids, which is their goal, but also straight kids. We’ve said it many times, but when gay rights groups push for laws and policies which respect all students equally, we’re trying to protect all kids, but, quite frankly, it’s not our kids that need protecting as much. It’s kids who are trapped in social conservative hinterlands, gay or straight, who need our help, because they’re not getting it from their own communities. Climates that foster support and respect for gay kids are naturally also climates that foster support for everyone. Of course, many TWO readers will see this story and say, “Duh.” But it’s nice to have a solid study to back up what we all intuitively know.

Alex Pareene has a great column up at Salon about the goings on in Wisconsin, and the right wing pout-rage over a woman who, yes, got shoved by a union guy, in a provoked confrontation.  Of course, as the video shows, the woman wasn’t really attacked.  The guy seemed to be trying to shove the camera away from his face and the wingnut woman got shoved in the process.  Granted, that is not nice, and should not happen.  But, as they always do, wingnuts from sea to shining sea are howling about what victims they are now.  This is not the “QOTD” part referenced in the post title, but it’s a little background:

Let me be clear: I abhor shoving of any kind. Shoving is never justified. The world would be a better place if there was no shoving, by anyone. Make loves, not shoves. But — and I could be wrong here — the gentleman’s actions seem to be aimed at the lens of the video camera, and not intended to cause harm to the person holding it. Pushing a camera away from one’s face seems less “thuggish” to me than it does … defensive. And purposefully picking fights with people in order to provoke an angry response does not really prove much of anything.

None of that matters, of course. What matters is that everyone on the right was simply waiting for one of their content suppliers to produce the requisite “violence from a union thug” video, and here it is. The scripts were all written in advance. Now everyone has jumped on the story.

[...]

Because these people are completely f**king shameless, the woman from the video has compared herself to Lara Logan.

Let me jump in real fast to note that these people are not only shameless about lying and crying victim, but this also shows the inherent misogyny of the conservative movement, in that the woman would compare getting shoved in an altercation she had a hand in provoking with a brutal sexual assault.

Here’s the QOTD part, and I’ll explain why this is relevant to us afterward, if it isn’t obvious already:

This is the height of the conservative movement’s pathological projection: Whatever they are accused of being or doing, the LEFT is the TRULY GUILTY PARTY. (This is the “liberals are the REAL racists” line, which is more of a comforting mantra than a compelling argument.) And now we’ve reached the point in that delusion where, if something bad happens to a leftist (and any member of the MSM is a default socialist), even if no one anywhere said it had anything to do with conservatives, it has to be demonstrated that the left does it too, and does it worse, and that conservatives are the true victims.

Sound familiar?  It should!

Every time gay kids get bullied to the point that they take their own lives, wingnuts like Matt Barber and Peter LaBarbera step into bitch and moan that “homosexuals are the real haters!” because we make fun of them and call them names like “Porno Pete.”  Just yesterday, Porno Pete tweeted me [the poor thing wants attention], saying “Here’s some real hate – Dan Savage’s vile ‘Santorum [DOT] com’ — wonder if @splcenter frauds will list it as a ‘hate site.’”  No, of course they won’t.  Dan Savage started that little website for Rick Santorum in response to Santorum‘s own prurient obsession with gay sex and his demonization of an entire class of humans.  Santorum is one moronic politician, and he’s a public figure.  The site is what is known as “creative activism,” and it’s also hilarious.  It does not demonize an entire group of people, and it’s not dishonest; these are two of the SPLC’s primary criteria for classifying groups as “hate groups,” and every Religious Right organization on the list is known for its rank demonization of LGBT people and its pathological dishonesty.

It’s useful to realize, especially when we’re dealing with issues of left vs. right, that these behaviors are exhibited by the Right, no matter what the issue is.  There has been incident after incident of right wing violence over the past several years, and every single time, the flying monkeys of the Right scream about how The Left Does It Too!  Guys?  There hasn’t been a pattern of left-wing violence in this country since the 1960′s or so.  That’s how far back we have to reach.

We also see it, ad nauseam, in the Religious Right’s constant repetition of three or four stories of supposed “Christian victimization” by gays — like the time the New Mexico photographer had to abide by the laws of her state, or the time that the New Jersey Methodists who operated a pavilion open to the public had to abide by the laws of their state, or the time a professional rabble-rouser feted by the Religious Right as a “frail, innocent old lady” got her styrofoam cross stomped on when she willingly entered into a mob of protesting gay people, angry that their rights had been taken away in California, etc.  None of these incidents resulted in dead bodies or even injury, and the common denominator in most of them is that some Fundamentalist crackpot seemed to believe that their transmogrified understanding of Christianity should trump their obligation to abide by the law in a secular society.  But we’ll keep hearing it!  The Gays Are The Real Haters!

Hell, just yesterday, Pat Buchanan whined that Obama had “capitulated to militant gays” on DOMA.  Oh yes, we are so militant, as we demand to be treated as equal citizens.

Why do they do this?  I think there are a lot of reasons, but one is that I believe that many wingnuts, deep down, know full well, that they’re on the wrong side of all of these issues.  On the gay front, it’s pretty much an accepted fact that hateful, anti-gay, religious rhetoric is not only conducive, but necessary, to create such a climate that in many corners of this country, it’s still okay to bully and abuse LGBT kids.  The fact that they’re still trying to explain away Matthew Shepard’s murder as a drug deal gone bad is just more evidence of this.  The fact that they have the unmitigated gall to oppose anti-bullying programs in the aftermath of a spate of gay kids committing suicide after being bullied, all in service of their opposition to the “homosexual agenda,” is evidence of their full-blown denial.  And the pathology came full circle when Linda Harvey blamed the suicides on the “gay agenda.”

The left does it too!  The liberals are the Real Racists!  The gays are the Real Haters!  It’s their fault, not ours!  Please, please, please, let us find a way to wash all this blood off our hands, so that we may sleep at night!

And so on.  It’s helpful to understand the specific fights we engage in with conservatives in context with the rest of their movement.  It’s not just about gay people, or unions, or women’s reproductive rights, or the poor, or Muslims, or blacks, or anything else.  It’s about all of these things, of course, but it’s mostly about propping themselves up as the Real Americans, which requires anyone who doesn’t conform to be demonized as “other,” while absolving themselves of any responsibility for the havoc they wreak on our society.

[h/t Alex Balk @ The Awl]

So much for “conservatives don’t hate us, really!”:

GOProud, the advocacy organization for homosexuals that also portrays itself as “conservative,” reportedly will be left out of the annual summit for conservatives in the United States, the CPAC meetings, next year.

Its inclusion last year and this year by David Keene, the outgoing chief of the American Conservative Union, which sponsors the Conservative Political Action Conference, had prompted a long list of major players in the movement, including the Heritage Foundation, the Media Research Center, Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, to boycott.

That left Al Cardenas, the new chairman, promising just days ago a “comprehensive vetting process on each CPAC participant.”

He said he wanted to make certain that longtime supporters of the conservative movement, such as those at the Heritage Foundation, are brought “back into the fold.”

Now a source has confirmed that a board vote has been taken that will realign plans for those who participate next year to exclude homosexual advocacy, although details had not been released.

[...]

According to a blogger at the FrumForum, Cardenas had warned it was “going to be difficult” to work with GOProud going forward.

He had cited the “behavior and attitude” of the homosexuality advocates, in light of the description by their leader, Chris Barron, of ACU Foundation chairman Cleta Mitchell as “a nasty bigot.”

Barron later apologized, saying he reached his breaking point because of “unfair and untrue attacks” on him, his friends, his organization and others.

“I shouldn’t have used the language that I did to describe Cleta Mitchell,” he said.

Oh hell, it’s probably one of the only completely accurate things Barron has said in the past year, at least about politics.

Now, granted, this is WingNutDaily, and as such should be treated as “unconfirmed reporting,” but there you have it.

[h/t Joe]

Roy Edroso compiled his favorite twenty-five quotes from CPAC for Esquire, and my goodness, this is really all you need to know about what appeals to a large portion of the citizenry. For instance:

22. “I refer to the debt — the new red menace. This time consisting of ink.” – Mitch Daniels.
21. “[Obama's reelection] would subject the country to what might be a fatal last dose of statism.” – Mitch Daniels.

And, on the subject of marriage equality and the like:

17. “Our liberties, which have made us great, are now destroying us.” – Rev. Michel Faulkner, at the CPAC “Traditional Marriage and Society” panel.

Weep for the stupid. One more, from the queen of the morons, then click over and read the rest:

3. “That is [liberalism's] goal — to destroy the family… [liberals] just made up this gay marriage thing… gays are natural conservatives.” – Ann Coulter.

What’s frightening is that gay conservatives actually think she’s onto something. Stupid liberal gays, wanting to be treated with dignity and equality, rather than just being offered a seat at the table and a semi-promise that nobody will punch them.

America’s dumbest Senator is making a statement:

Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) is the latest Republican who has chosen to skip this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) over its inclusion of a pro-gay group.

“With leading conservatives organizations not participating this year, Senator DeMint will not be attending,” Wesley Denton, a spokesman for the senator, told CNN. “He hopes to attend a unified CPAC next year.”

Yes, unified against gays, because he’s an unreconstructed bigot…

For once, I agree with Dan Blatt at Gay Patriot:

Leading conservative organizations? Well, Heritage isn’t participating. That’s about the only leading conservative organization I can think of that’s passing on the event. Seems some of those supposedly leading groups are up in arms that GOProud is participating organization.

Heh. I agree that groups like CWA and FRC need to, you know, get a hold on their delusions of grandeur and realize that they represent a demographic that’s rapidly, um, dying off. In fifteen or twenty years, the FRC will be lucky to get a kiosk in the lobby.