On October 12, Peter LaBarbera (Porno Pete) upbraided blogger Joe Jervis for pointing out that the Ku Klux Klan agreed with LaBarbera on a particular issue. In a typical tizzy, Porno Pete had this to say:
I jest, of course. But Joe is serious–that’s the sad part. (Apparently he didn’t get the memo that the first one to call the other guy a “Nazi” in a debate is the automatic loser)
Actually, it was the Klan, not the Nazi Party. However that’s just a minor detail with the main point being that Porno Pete has a big issue with Nazi comparisons. (Although Porno Pete goes surreptitiously into gay leather events with his camera to smear an entire community, precisely the same way the Nazis filmed in the Polish ghetto for the movie “The Eternal Jew.”)
It is clear that Porno Pete believes that Nazi comparisons are for losers.
This is interesting because as Evan pointed out, Porno Pete’s buddies at the Liberty Counsel compared gay activists to Nazis on the radio this week. They did so after a cement block was thrown through a window — allegedly by LGBT activists — where Porno Pete was honoring Scott Lively, another hate group leader.
Staver: Well, when you go out and label somebody a hate group you think of the KKK …
Barber: It emboldens these people …
Staver: It also, it begins, you know, it’s the same thing that happened in the Nazi Holocaust where they start to just demonize and stigmatize and then at some point in time you don’t even think that someone’s human and then, you know, we look at it and our consciences are shocked but if you look at how it ultimately began where they began to just demonize and dehumanize them, that’s what’s happening with this labeling of hate groups.
So, where is Porno Pete? Why isn’t he denouncing the analogy made by Staver? His hypocritical silence is deafening.
By now, you know the story. A few weeks ago, Porno Pete got twelve or thirteen of his closest bigots together for a Spaghetti-O’s dinner of some sort out in the Chicago suburbs, for the purposes of honoring super-bigot Scott Lively, the main proponent of the lie that gays caused the Holocaust. Scott Lively, of course, had a huge hand in Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” legislation. Anyway, some ne’er-do-well gay “activists,” or possibly Porno Pete’s own people [who knows?] decided to make a pathetic situation more pathetic by throwing a couple of bricks through the window of the establishment where the soiree was to be held. This is, of course, worse than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor and Carrot Top, combined. At first Peter was crying that it was a “hate crime,” which it isn’t, as bigotry is not actually a protected class under hate crimes laws. It’s a simple, stupid, misguided act of vandalism. Oh, but now, craving more attention from the ordeal, he is calling it a “terror-attack.” Really. Here he is, setting up a video from his butchest friend, Matt “Bam Bam” Barber, the one he can always rely on to be his manly defender when people hurt his feelings:
Note that at the time of this recording, Barber was relying on early reports coming from the Oct. 15th terror-attack on Christian Liberty Academy, in which it was feared that the pro-homosexual assailants had entered the building and perhaps created water damage. Actually, they did not enter the building, and the vandalism that did occur was created by large paver bricks thrown through the glass doors and windows of CLA (accompanied by notes threatening further violence).
Yeah, bricks thrown through a window when nobody is around do not constitute an act of “terrorism.” Sorry. I’m in complete agreement that whoever did it — and if it was gays of ANY sort, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves for being such grade-A dumbasses — was in the wrong, but this melodrama really gets under my skin, especially when I have to report seemingly every week on some gay kid who killed himself because he was bullied so badly by his schoolmates, family, church or community into feeling he had nothing to live for. Considering that those sorts of messages start with people like Porno Pete and Scott Lively and their perverted interpretation of the Bible, and then trickle down to those kids, I’m just having a hard time writing about this “terror-attack” with a straight face.
The video Porno Pete was setting up is from the Liberty Counsel, and features a really pathetic, fearful conversation between Matt Barber and Mat Staver. They discuss the incident, and then go on to ratchet up the victim mentality by saying that the Southern Poverty Law Center, by labeling them hate groups [for their vicious anti-gay bigotry, and also the fact that they are pathological liars], is doing the same thing to them that the Nazis did to the Jews.
Seriously. I would cry them a river, but my eyes are too busy rolling into the back of my skull. Why do wingnut men always come across as such sissies?!
Staver: This aggressive homosexual agenda is not about tolerance, it’s about dominance. And the more emboldened they get, the more laws that they get, the more vocal they become, the more hostile they become, the more aggressive they become, and the more violent, in this particular case, they become.
Barber: Americans for Truth, as well as Liberty Counsel for that matter, is one of those flashpoints, they have been unfairly labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hard left-wing extremist organization that uses smears in order to label Christian organizations that take a principled stand on the biblical model of sexual morality in love, speak God’s truth in love, they label them hate groups. But really, they are fanning the flames of this kind of violence with their rhetoric, by labeling organizations a hate group. And they’re partly responsible for this, indirectly, I’m not going to say they’re directly responsible …
Staver: Well, when you go out and label somebody a hate group you think of the KKK …
Barber: It emboldens these people …
Staver: It also, it begins, you know, it’s the same thing that happened in the Nazi Holocaust where they start to just demonize and stigmatize and then at some point in time you don’t even think that someone’s human and then, you know, we look at it and our consciences are shocked but if you look at how it ultimately began where they began to just demonize and dehumanize them, that’s what’s happening with this labeling of hate groups.
I can only presume that Bam Bam is really upset about being passed over for the new season of Dancing With The Stars in favor of Chaz Bono, because he is full metal emo today about how much Christians are “persecuted” by mean old gays:
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it right now. The sexual anarchist lobby, this radical, militant lobby, wants three things in this order: they want to see those of us who hold traditional values and have a biblical view of sexual behavior and sexual morality; they want to see us behind bars. Absent that, if that doesn’t work, they want to see us discredited, our licenses, my law licenses revoked, unable to teach in schools and so forth. They want us completely discredited and marginalized to the fringes of society. Finally and included in that is the inability, they want to see people like us not able to make a living. And that’s why they’re going after these organizations and they’re using economic terrorism, for lack of a better phrase.
I’ll say it right now, in this order:
1. No, you twit, we don’t want you behind bars. Stop whining and be a man.
2. Discredited, yes. You, and by “you,” I mean the institutional Christian Right, are pretty much proven liars, and also you inject an inordinate amount of hate into the public discourse, and by “inordinate,” I mean, “an inordinate amount for a group whose numbers are going down faster than a Republican senator showing his butthole on Grindr.”
3. That’s right, we want to deny you the right to make a living. Give me one link from a gay organization that proves that scurrilous assertion, or even suggests that we want to deprive you the right to make a living, or shut up.
Good lord. It’s funny because one of their own [Bryan Fischer] suggested recriminalizing homosexuality yesterday, and we all know about that time Peter Sprigg suggested gays be “exported” from the United States. Oh, and the fact that these theocratic goons support laws that allow employers to fire people for being gay.
I don’t think these people would know the truth if it slapped them in their whining jowls.
Peter is engaging in some slapfight with Alvin McEwen over the firing, six years ago, of his longtime favorite boxer and overall studmuffin, Matt Barber, from Allstate Insurance. Though I have no desire to get into the details of it — for one thing, it is boring, and for another, if Matt had been a valued or liked employee in the first place, I doubt they would have canned him over writing pig ignorant articles full of medieval bigotry on the weekends — I will respond to this one thing:
Alvin is a bitter fellow who — although purporting to factually correct alleged pro-family falsehoods — regularly dishes them out himself (go HERE to see him viciously slander me as “Porno Pete”).
God, what a whiner. Being called a silly name — a name he got [FROM US] due to his strange obsession with fetish sex, an obsession shared by few gays and lesbians, and his bizarre need to post pictures of fetish sex events on his supposedly family friendly blog — is “vicious slander” and a “falsehood”? Grow a pair, dude. I mean, you’ve got a hate group to lead. I know that most wingnuts have absolutely absurd victim complexes, but you’d think they’d at least try to play the part.
One more thing. In Porno Pete’s defense of his shining knight in boxing gloves, he says this:
Matt immediately was called in on a Friday afternoon. Ironically, he was told that Allstate “celebrates diversity,” and that his (traditional) values did not reflect those of Allstate.
For what will surely not be the last time, as we are not dealing with intelligent people: “tolerance” and “diversity,” by their very definitions, do not include tolerance for rank bigotry. Why? Because the rank bigotry espoused by the Christian Right in the United States is, in preschool terms, the equivalent of a “poor” rating on the “plays well with others” section of the report card. If they simply held their dumb*ss beliefs in private, without feeling the need to vomit them at the rest of the population all day long, every day, and if they didn’t feel the need to try to use their influence to make life worse for the rest of the population, then we would be dealing with something different. Instead, they hurt people, they inject hate into the discourse, and innocent kids are dealt hands of depression and suicidal thoughts at their hands.
So, you know, Christian Right, please continue to whine about how you’re not being “tolerated.” The more you talk, the more people turn their backs on you. In that way, you do our jobs for us.
The debt ceiling deal has left the Tea Party more disliked than ever, as a recent New York Times poll shows. In April, 2010, 21 percent of Americans approved of the Tea Party while 18 percent disapproved of it. Now, 20 percent approve while a stunning 40 percent disapprove of it. Ironically, the conservative movement is now more unpopular than two often-marginalized groups it sometimes rails against — Muslims and atheists — and is the least popular of the 23 groups the poll asked about.
But in data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like “atheists” and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.
HAHAHAHA, YAY, so anyway.
Dear Christian Right: America hates you. Hates you, hates you, hates you. Does not consider you representative of “American values” or “traditional values” or anything else. Hates you. Doesn’t want to live next to you, because property values are already sucky as it is.
Gays raise property values in neighborhoods, but you don’t. Anyway.
What a funny story to start our Thursday! Say it again! Real, actual Americans like Muslims and Atheists more than Teabaggers or Linda Harvey or Maggie Gallagher or Peter LaBarbera or Matt Barber or any of their other ideological trans fat substitutes. Muslims and atheists! I love polls!
The pollsters have also taken time to find out what really drives Teabaggers:
They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.
More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today.
Just old bigot racists in Hoverounds, as we always suspected. Whatever.
There have been a few articles in the past day or so, dissecting the fact that the Teabagging movement, which seemed so upright and powerful in the last several years, is basically flaccid these days. Why? Well, you see, The Price Is Right is on…
*actual rate of herpes popularity not sampled, but just making a point.
This is just epic, and I love that it comes from the man who holds the title of Most Disingenuous Bigot in Wingnuttia, Dr. Michael Brown. We don’t cover him very often, but he wrote a 700-page tome earlier this year on how much he hates gay people, but really just wants to be friends. He’s also, like Porno Pete and Bam Bam Barber, one of those anti-gay activists who can’t seem to write or talk about gay people without throwing around juvenile slurs and “jokes,” which are only funny to bigots who are uncomfortable in their own skin. The following video is a great example of that. It’s intended to be funny, and it is, but not for the reasons Michael Brown probably thinks. In it, we see a teacher reading a book about gay parenting to her class, and one little kid starts having some sort of day hallucination about how weird/bad it would be to have gay parents. Aside from the part where one of the dads burns dinner [are gay guys known for being bad cooks? Better notify the James Beard Foundation...], it mostly consists of a child being instructed to have a Michael Brown-esque bigoted reaction to being in the same room with two people of the same gender. Again, it’s a pretty funny video, but most of the people watching will be laughing out of pity for whoever made the video.
It’s also funny because all credible studies show that the kids of two gay parents do just as well as the kids of two straight parents, on average. The only significant area where we do better is that we don’t raise prissy little bigots like Michael Brown, whereas there is obviously a risk of that among heteros.
When Religious Right wackos feverishly and obsessively troll the comments sections of gay blogs looking for things to use as ammo when reporting to their mouth-moving “pro-family” readers, and when they send reporters into fetish sex festivals attended by tiny portions of the LGBT community to engender Fear of Gay in those same readers, they are simply reporting and/or doing god’s work.
However, when liberal groups who act as watchdogs of the Religious Right simply report their words and actions verbatim, we are either “cyberstalkers” or engaging in jihad, according to professional whine-mongers like Matt Barber and Bryan Fischer. Why you gotta be jihadi cyber-stalkers, Right Wing Watch?
This is your weekly reminder, Maggie Gallagher, Brian Brown, Tony Perkins, Peter Sprigg, Laurie Higgins, Peter LaBarbera, Matt Barber, Linda Harvey, and whatever other sad sack bigots I missed: UPDATE YOUR RESUMES.
We’re winning the younger generation on abortion, at least in theory. What about same-sex marriage? We’re losing on that one, especially among the 20- and 30-somethings: 65 to 70 percent of them favor same-sex marriage. I don’t know if that’s going to change with a little more age—demographers would say probably not. We’ve probably lost that. I don’t want to be extremist here, but I think we need to start calculating where we are in the culture.
You and the demographers are right, Jim. Those numbers ain’t goin’ back, baby. Civil Rights issues never, ever, follow that sort of trajectory. EVER. Especially on the issue of equality for gays and lesbians — it doesn’t matter what your family looks like, what you believe, what color you are, how much you make, or anything else: you have gays and lesbians in your family, in your circle of friends, in your church. And the second people get to know us, they start voting for us, because they learn that what they’ve been taught is not only a lie, but a damned lie.
[The stuff about reproductive rights is wishful thinking, but eh, not getting into that right now.]
The interview in World is subscription-only, which makes me laugh, so I’m kind of relying on Pareene at Salon for these quotes from the interview, but he pulls out another interesting one about the Obama family:
I may not agree with any of his policies. I do appreciate that he’s married to his first wife and raising his two children. We need more men like that. I once said that America would be better off if we had more families that reflected the Obamas, and a lot of conservatives went nuts with that, but it’s true! Some of the conservative candidates that we put up—between a couple of them recently, I think they had seven or eight marriages. That seems a bit hypocritical.
The overarching message here? Clean up your own damn house, fundies, or as the bumper sticker on my old car used to say, “Focus On Your Own Damn Family.” It’s a known fact anyway that liberals do better with things like marriage than fundamentalists anyway, so it’s not like they have anything to teach us. We’re doin’ just fine.
Still, it’s nice to see a prominent Evangelical leader begin to embrace reality.
And Peter was the only one Matt was trying to impress, so yay.
Uh, Pete? There’s a difference between being offended by a joke — we’re not — and not laughing because an attempted joke isn’t funny. Our reaction to Bam Bam’s immediate need to make a gay joke in the wake of bin Laden’s death, was pity, on two fronts, not outrage. Pity because this is yet another example of the fact that wingnuts just can’t Do Funny. There is a reason that the great majority of humorists are liberals — comedic talent tends to correspond with liberal values, though I’m not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg — and that conservatives aren’t well represented, and it’s that the best humor has to have some sort of grounding in reality in order to work. A religious extremist making a strangely timed gay joke that only will appeal to a few slobbering wingnuts who can’t stop thinking about gay sex on the occasion of the killing of another religious extremist simply doesn’t qualify as humor. The other reason we felt pity was because, as I said earlier, the fact that the immediate reaction of an anti-gay wingnut to this event was to reveal that even then, he was thinking about gay sex, was sad and disturbing.
Many funny things have been said since last night. Indeed, over at the humor site Wonkette — where I am a humor writer! — the initial post on bin Laden’s death was tagged with these words: ”Texas Justice Administered By Kenyan.”
That is funny. Not Bam Bam’s little attempt at a schoolyard dig for the benefit of nine or ten chairborne wingnuts.
Fundamentalists really like the doctrine of hell. Though there is absolutely no evidence for any such thing, and though, in this atheist’s opinion, the idea of a deity sending its own creations to eternal torture is obviously made up, as it is merely a reflection of the worst of human anger and frailty, Fundies cling to it because it gives them license to lord their strange beliefs over everyone else, and it allows them to cloak their irrational prejudices in the language of concern and love. Here’s Matt Barber over at Peter’s Playland [no link], engaging in Pete and Matt’s annual Easter tradition of complaining about the San Francisco ‘Hunky Jesus Contest’:
“While watching this repulsive, Satanic display I was surprised that I didn’t feel outrage – that I wasn’t angry. I felt pity for these poor, lost souls. I felt sorry for them. They were pathetic; sad; empty; foolish. I was embarrassed for them.
“Still, God will not be mocked. As I continued to watch I began to feel fear; not for me, but for them. As they pranced about on stage and the pagan audience reveled in their foolish blasphemy, I thought, ‘These poor souls. Someday they’ll stand before the very Lord they mock to face His judgment.’ In fact, based on the destructive lifestyle they lead, we know that that day will likely come considerably sooner for them than for most. I shudder to think of the literal Hell that awaits them lest they repent, fall to their knees and believe upon Christ Jesus, the Savior of the world; the Master and creator of the universe.
“As Christians we should all pray, as Jesus did, that God ‘forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”
My reaction to the Hunky Jesus Contest is approximately the same as it was last year: “Meh.” The religious pout-rage over it is the usual, as fundies think their beliefs should be above criticism or mocking. It’s obviously a silly, tongue-in-cheek event, some people enjoy it, and no one gets hurt. So, you know, who cares?
But let’s break down Bam Bam’s hateful little whine for a second. He places himself on a pedestal above these people by “pitying” them. There is nothing about Matt Barber that any sane human being would aspire to emulate, so the fact that he’s looking down on them is sad. His labeling of them as “pathetic; sad; empty; foolish” strikes me as projection, since nothing in the video would suggest that the people at the event are any of those things. Perhaps he’s a bit jealous and angry that they seem to be having fun? He then immediately falls onto the Fundie crutch of “God will not be mocked.” Actually, the fundamentalist conception of “god” is mocked all the time, as are other regional deities, and there’s no evidence that any actual deity is bothered by any of this. He then fleshes out the revenge fantasy, with the usual euphemisms: “As they pranced about on stage and the pagan audience reveled in their foolish blasphemy, I thought, ‘These poor souls. Someday they’ll stand before the very Lord they mock to face His judgment.’ In fact, based on the destructive lifestyle they lead, we know that that day will likely come considerably sooner for them than for most. I shudder to think of the literal Hell that awaits them lest they repent, fall to their knees and believe upon Christ Jesus, the Savior of the world; the Master and creator of the universe.”
You see, he may be claiming to feel fear and sadness, but there is absolutely no evidence for his contentions that these people will be sent to any sort of hell, whether literal or poetic. No, these people are out having fun, doing nothing wrong, and Matt knows it. He may even perhaps sense that their lives are more fun than his is. Wingnuts’ criticism of “coastal elites” tends to be tinged with the same kind of thinly veiled jealousy of people who are smarter, more educated, funnier, and more cultured than they are. In order to maintain his very flimsy pedestal, Matt must place himself above these people and express fear and sadness [thinly veiled glee] that, by his estimation, his deity will rise up and destroy these people, if they don’t abandon their authenticity and fulfillment in order to live dull, unfulfilling lives, as Matt and his cohorts do.
