In new video, Frank Mugisha of Sexual Minorities Uganda confirms that U.S. ex-gay activists met with members of the Uganda Parliament and claimed that international homosexuals were out to “recruit” Ugandan children.

Hat tip: Box Turtle Bulletin

Influential Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wrote an excellent column today, calling on Rick Warren and other evangelicals to do more to stop Uganda’s heinous Anti-Homosexuality Bill. According to Parker:

The proposed law is a case study in the unintended consequences of moral colonialism….If we (Rick Warren) decide that genocide is too political for interference, then what good is moral leadership?…

….Other evangelical Christians operating in Uganda are less easily excused from responsibility in the country’s increasingly hostile attitudes toward gays. Often cited as having stirred the pot are pastors Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer, who last March worked with Ugandan faith leaders and politicians to help stop the “homosexualization” of the country….

…In a “Meet the Press” interview last November, Warren said he never takes sides, but one wishes he would. To borrow his own words, it is in certain cases extreme, unjust and un-Christian not to.

Parker is correct to say that Warren and other evangelicals have not done enough, considering their deep involvement in Uganda. At Truth Wins Out, we warmly welcomed Warren’s denunciation of the hate bill, however, that was merely covering his behind.

If Warren and others (Alan Chambers, James Inhofe, and Doug Coe – I mean you) are serious about stopping the persecution, imprisonment and murder of innocent people, they will board planes to Kampala this week and speak directly to the people and lawmakers of Uganda. They helped cause this horrific mess, so it is their  duty to clean it up.

I just checked Orbitz and confirmed that flights still fly to Kampala. Will any evangelical butts fill the seats? Or, do they only light fires in places like Uganda and then butt out when there is too much heat in the kitchen?

The world is watching….and these “moral leaders” will be judged by their action — or inaction.

Cliff Kincaid is a peach.  Really.  He’s one of the only Radical Christian Imams who is honest about the fact that he wants gay people dead.  He made his original statements last week, and now he’s gotten on the internet again to flesh out his explanation for why gay people should be dead.  He also has some harsh words for Senator Tom Coburn, who has joined up with Al Franken and Russ Feingold in drafting a Senate bill condemning the Ugandan legislation.    (Absorb that last sentence before I go on, will you?  Coburn has joined with Franken and Feingold.  That’s how universal the disgust over this bill really is, among evolved, sentient human beings.  Lambs are lying down with wingnuts, for god’s sake.  Apparently Cliff Kincaid is not an evolved, sentient human being, at least not by any rational definition.)  So let’s have a look at what Cliffy has to say:

Echoing the claims of liberals in the media, who have targeted Uganda for isolation and a denial of foreign aid for considering the legislation, Coburn has called it “an absurd proposal to execute gays” that somehow threatens progress against AIDS. Lesbian MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow has repeatedly referred to the legislation as the “Kill the Gays bill.”

But as AIM has reported in a series of articles, this is deliberate distortion. Maddow and her media collaborators, such as Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post, have tried to obscure the fact that the government of Uganda is considering passage of the anti-homosexuality bill because of the growing concern by officials and religious leaders that foreign homosexuals and special interest groups are trying to spread homosexuality throughout the country and undermine the country’s return to traditional moral values.  Campaigns and groups promoting the rights of “sexual minorities” have emerged in Uganda and other African countries, with funding from billionaire George Soros, a major financial supporter of “gay rights” in the U.S.

Sadly, no.  It’s too bad Cliff Kincaid is an unrepentant pathological liar, but he is.  There is no distortion in the reporting.  Any literate human being (sorry to exclude you, Cliff) can read the bill.  The fact that certain Christian leaders in Uganda are fools who either truly believe that “foreign gays” are invading Uganda, or are deliberately manipulating the people in order to distract them from the real problems facing that nation is not a proof that the reporting on the legislation is any less than factual.  What’s sad is that Cliff Kincaid apparently is just as easily spooked by gay people as the Ugandan religious leaders, what with all the factual information at his disposal.

Of course, you know you’re dealing with a nutcase when they bring an issue back to George Soros.  The fact that this one billionaire who happens to support progressive causes (like the Right doesn’t have any parallel figures) has become such a villainous boogeyman for much of the American Right exposes just what scaredy-pants ninnies right-wingers really are.

Uganda emphasizes abstinence and monogamy in its fight against AIDS, in contrast to the reckless “safe sex” approach popularized by “progressives” in the U.S. who want to avoid finding homosexuality itself to be a dangerous “lifestyle.”

Uh, actually, the safe sex (scare quotes not necessary for things that actually exist, Cliffypants!) approach is the effective approach.  Uganda used to be a model for HIV/AIDS prevention, but their numbers have actually plateaued (and may be rising) over the last several years, as the emphasis on abstinence began to overshadow a comprehensive approach.  So, wrong again, Clifton!

The Ugandan bill does provide for harsh measures against homosexual conduct, including the death penalty for such practices as pedophilia, facilitating homosexual activity, and deliberately spreading AIDS. As such, however, Ugandan Christian ministers see the legislation as a necessary and continuing part of Uganda’s successful anti-AIDS effort.

Well, if Ugandan Christians think it’s necessary, far be it from us to question them, right, Cliff?  I mean, there’s nothing wrong with a little genocide, as long as the leaders have a rationale, right?

Conservatives were shocked to see Coburn, a conservative leader and medical doctor, jump into bed with Feingold and Franken and other liberals to attack Uganda’s legislative process and pro-family political leaders and activists.

Uh, what conservatives were shocked, Cliff?  It’s not a good idea to refer to yourself in the plural, sir.  It’s a good indicator of mental illness.

Uganda was once ruled by a homosexual pedophile King named Mwanga, who tortured and murdered Christian youth who refused his sexual advances. Their sacrifices are celebrated every June 3, Martyr’s Day in the nation. This terrible period in Uganda’s history has never been forgotten.

Relevance?  The Mwanga thing has been repeated by Scott Lively as well.  Here’s the thing:  As usual, these men are lying.  Even when they keep the general parameters of the story correctly intact, they lie.  Here are the actual details of the Martyr’s Day history.  The young men were killed for their Christian faith.  The timeframe for this was 1885-1887.  Mwanga was born in 1868.  This means that his time of “pedophilia” happened when he was ages 17 to 19.  The martyrs ranged in age from 18-25.  There is no scenario under which sexual advances toward grown men can be considered “pedophilia,” especially when the supposed pedophile is younger than them!

The extent of Cliff Kincaid’s pathological lying is truly stunning.

Anyway, he goes on and on and on, and it gets boring after a while, but at no time does he express any personal problems with the idea of genocide against gay people, and he continues to condemn Coburn for speaking out against it, so we must only assume that Cliff Kincaid actively desires the death of gay people.  I hope the Southern Poverty Law Center* is paying attention.

(h/t Right Wing Watch)

*Incidentally, we reported the other day that the Illinois Family Institute had been put back on the list of SPLC anti-gay hate groups, because they had.  Jeremy Hooper also reported it.  But now their name is mysteriously missing from the list again, and I’d like to know why.  More when I find out.

You see, behind every obnoxious book is a secret gay author!

Dianetics?  Richard Simmons.

Atlas Shrugged?  J. Edgar Hoover.

Twilight?  That would be Bruce Vilanch.

Jewel’s book of poetry?  Wanda Sykes!

This is the world according to gay-obsessed Scott Lively, who’s most known around these parts as the man who went to Uganda and told an audience there, among other grotesque and dishonest things, that gays were responsible for the genocide in Rwanda, essentially handing David Bahati one of the proverbial guns he needed to get the genocide going.  Now he’s popped up again, e-mailing a blogger named Benzion Chinn, who had been writing about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to let him know that there’s a theory out there that maybe it was written by George Bernard Shaw!  Here’s Lively’s e-mail:

At the Library of Congress is an obscure book by Samuel Igra which makes the case that “The Protocols…Zion” was actually written by George Bernard Shaw. I don’t remember the title, but I read a portion in DC when I was researching another book by Igra and I remember thinking at the time that his case seemed quite plausible, though I don’t remember the details now.

It is common knowledge that Shaw was a close friend of the homosexual poet Bruce Douglas, the “translator” of the Protocols.
Regards,

Dr. Scott Lively

He’s just sayin’!  Here’s a thought, you know, maybe it was written by one of my super-homosexual boogeymen!

Chinn, of course, handily disposed of this notion after doing a bit of research on Lively’s obsession with blaming gay people for every evil that’s ever befallen the world:

Samuel Igra, Lively’s source, seems to have been one of the main originators of this Nazism and homosexuality link with his 1945 book, Germany’s National Vice. According to Igra, Hitler was a homosexual prostitute in Vienna and then in Munich from 1907-1914. (See Gregory Woods A History of Gay Literature: the Male Tradition pg. 251-53.) Obviously there were Nazis who were homosexual. The most famous example is Ernst Rohm of the SD. While an early member of the party, Rohm was killed off in the infamous “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934. Considering the very real persecution of homosexuals under the Nazi regime, saying that Nazism was a homosexual movement (as opposed to individual Nazis being homosexual) strikes me as the height of perversity.

Bruce Douglas was the young lover of Oscar Wilde’s, whose father got into a libel suit with Wilde, which eventually brought about the downfall of Wilde in English society. Douglas did do one of the first English translations of the Protocols in 1919, nearly twenty years after it was first written. The Protocols came out of Russia, and while it was plagiarized from many sources, including one French anti-Semitic tract, it is clearly a product of reactionary Russian circles. Personally I find the idea that George Bernard Shaw would have written the Protocols to be offensive. I would have no problem accepting Shaw as an anti-Semite along the lines of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. But to think that Shaw would have written such a piece of garbage as the Protocols, boggles the mind. If Shaw had wanted to write a book about Jews plotting to rule the world, this book would have been a model of wit and would have me convinced to become an Elder.

Heh.  And what is Chinn’s expertise?  Oh, just Jewish History.  In other words, Chinn sort of knows what he’s talking about.

So anyway, that happened.

But wait, there’s more!  Lively got a bur in his britches over Chinn reprinting the e-mail on his blog and sent another e-mail, wherein he called the (conservative!) Jewish History teacher an anti-Semite!  Really.  No, seriously, really. You cannot make this stuff up:

Dear Mr. Chinn,

I offered privately what I thought would be a helpful research tip regarding a source you were not likely to have discovered, not a personal conviction to be publicly ridiculed. It was a friendly gesture to a stranger. Your incivility is unbecoming a man of letters.

If anti-Semitism is the dehumanization of people because of their beliefs and values, I’m sorry to say you have become your own case-in-point.

It’s very strange, though, that Lively would be bothered by this.  He has, after all, made a career based on just cold making things up about gay people in order to make us look like murderous maniacs, pedophiles and what-have-you.  This fits right in with his pattern.

You really should go read Chinn’s entire response to this.  It’s fair to say that there are things in there that, in another situation, I would disagree with fervently.  Bear in mind that this is a conversation between a conservative religious person and an irrational, insane,and most importantly, malevolent homophobe.  I’m willing to grant that there is a difference.  But Chinn seems like an honest broker.  Not so, Mr. Lively.

So anyway, there you have it.  If you’re interested, the discourse just keeps going and going…  Somewhere in the second link, Lively tries to defend his work in Uganda, but you know, we have the video, and it says otherwise.  As I said before, it’s a discourse between a conservative Jewish man who I could spend hours debating (but will not, because there comes a point when it’s boring) and the extremely disturbed, delusional homophobe Scott Lively.  So it gets a bit tiresome.

I think we’ve covered the parts of this that are important.

Left Behind series?  Ghostwritten by RuPaul, but I’m sure you figured that…

(h/t Wendy Leigh for tipping me off to this)

Cute:

MOSCOW — The mayor of Moscow, known for his overtly homophobic statements, said Monday that he would never allow a gay pride parade in the city, calling it “Satanic” and saying marchers should be punished.

“A gay parade… cannot be called anything but a Satanic act,” Yury Luzhkov told an education conference, quoted by Interfax news agency. “We haven’t permitted such a parade and we won’t permit it in the future.”

Luzhkov called for gay marchers to be punished. “It’s high time that we stop propagating nonsense discussions about human rights, and bring to bear on them the full force and justice of the law,” he said.

Gay rights campaigner Nikolai Alexeyev reaffirmed that plans for this year’s gay pride parade will go ahead despite the ban.

Good for them.  By the way, how’s that whole “catching up to Europe” thing going?

(h/t AMERICAblog Gay)

I had wondered, since he had been strangely silent on the issue, most likely because his friend Scott Lively has been so intimately involved in the situation.

But for the record, Peter thinks the genocide is A-OK, and that Americans are arrogant for thinking it’s okay to interfere.  Oh, he doesn’t say it that explicitly, but from the entire tone of the piece, it can be ascertained that Pete hasn’t lost much sleep over the plight of dark-skinned gays in a land that he couldn’t identify on a map even if you were threatening to hit “delete” on his file folder full o’ Folsom photos.*  He adds some throwaway line at the end about supposedly not having studied the legislation in Uganda, but what part of “death penalty for gay people” requires further study, Pete?  Do you need to get out your magnifying glass or something?

Elsewhere in his post, before he quote Robert Knight’s dishonest, genocide-defending screed in full (which I tore apart here), Peter takes some time to complain (yet again) that Warren Throckmorton has discovered his soul and is trying to work against some of the more violent and hateful forces for which he used to apologize.  This is to be expected because, much like a wealthy white person who defends the rights of the poor and minorities is often viewed by her peers as a class traitor, Peter is probably more burned by Throckmorton’s “betrayal” than he ever could be about something so quaint as mass murder against an entire sector of the Ugandan population.

Also, Peter issues a “challenge to accomodationists” like Throckmorton wherein he will “stand corrected” if somebody can show him where sexual orientation “as this concept is currently understood and posited in academia, the media and society” is mentioned in the Bible.  I don’t know why this is really a challenge, because nobody claims that the Bible accurately describes sexual orientation.  The Bible also fails to accurately describe microbiology, climatology, Keynesian economic theory, Ugg boots, iPhones, Jersey Shore and Snuggies, but that’s not an argument for their nonexistence.  Or maybe it is in Peter’s world.  Maybe he just hasn’t written a column called “Blankets don’t have sleeves and Wayne Besen is mean for saying they do!” yet.

So now we’re caught up on what Peter thinks about Uganda.  We can go back to grown-up stuff now, until next time.

Alvin has more here.

*Say that five times fast.

UPDATE BELOW

I’m fighting the temptation to type out a bunch of exclamation points and various other characters, paste the hyperlink, and hit post.

But no, let’s look at this.  Robert Knight of Coral Ridge Ministries, and former Concerned Woman for America, has written a piece in which he claims that the New York Times editorial “Hate Begets Hate,” which correctly points out that American Evangelicals Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundige and Don Schmierer helped feed the culture of hatred against gays which has led to the awful “kill the gays” legislation in Uganda, is merely a smear piece focused on “crucifying Christians.”  Well, get up off the fainting couch, Bob, because we need to have a discussion.

First let’s look at Knight’s complaints about the NYT piece:

This humdinger of a self-descriptive screed has it all: wild, unsubstantiated charges; villains; hysterical calls for action and a smug, holier-than-thou tone that would put Saturday Night Live’s Church Lady to shame.

(…)

I don’t know Mr. Brundidge, but I do know Mr. Lively and Mr. Schmierer. Both are honest and courageous men who, out of Christian compassion, dare to tell the truth about homosexuality. For this, the Times brands them as hatemongers.

While Mr. Lively has written perceptively and passionately about countering the homosexual activists’ political and cultural agenda, there is no evidence of “hate.” Trying to steer someone away from destructive, immoral, changeable behavior is an act of love, not hate.

(…)

And it is beyond absurd to label as a bigot a man like Don Schmierer, who supports AIDS ministries and reaches out to sexually conflicted people with the life-changing gospel of Jesus Christ. Casting the gentle, soft spoken Mr. Schmierer as a “hater” is like calling Mother Teresa a foul-mouthed harpy.

Honest?  Christian compassion?  The truth?  Perhaps, you’ve missed the news, Bob, but we now have video evidence that your compassionate, honest friend Scott Lively, who has spent his entire career smearing gay people as serial killers, murderers, and Holocaust instigators, indeed told that Ugandan audience that gay people were responsible for the Rwandan genocide!  I don’t know in what possible world that could be considered honest, compassionate, or anything resembling the truth, but if that’s the world where you live, Robert Knight, I hope never to visit it.  In case you’re not aware, no credible historian supports Lively’s specious and evil claims.

Also specious and evil is Robert Knight’s claim that one’s sexuality can be changed through “therapy,” an idea which is condemned by virtually every authoritative body which has weighed in on the subject.  I could look around the internet for links, but there’s no need.  It’s all on this little website called Truth Wins Out.  Perhaps Mr. Knight has heard of it.

And as to Don Schmierer, the fact that he’s gentle and soft-spoken is quite irrelevant, and as I’ve pointed out before, Don Schmierer’s life’s mission of convincing hurting gay people that they have to change who they are in order to find favor with God is not love, but instead, intense hatred at its core.  Schmierer may not feel that he’s being hateful, but because he is working within the hateful, unscientific, and verifiably harmful “ex-gay” movement, he is a party to that hatred, and any blood that is spilled is equally on his hands.  Besides, people much closer to the situation than I am tried to warn Schmierer not to go.  Schmierer doesn’t seem to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, in general, but when he allowed himself to be associated with this, even after being warned of the nature of the event and the character of the people involved, he signed off on it.

You can read Knight’s entire bilious screed if you want, but the quote above is really all you need to know.  As he comes near to the close of his piece, he says this:

The Times’ editors need to come to terms with their knee-jerk spasms against evangelical Christians and others who defend family values. They routinely depict pro-marriage Americans as motivated solely by hatred and prejudice, never by genuine, heartfelt concerns.

Yeah, well, this isn’t about “pro-marriage Americans,” Bob.  This is about three men who went to a nation already rife with homophobia and handed them the proverbial gun needed to justify their desires to go ahead and start killing gay people.

You should be ashamed of yourself, for the hatred and prejudice you euphemistically refer to as “genuine, heartfelt concerns,” and to which you are now giving aid and comfort, is on the verge of producing a verifiable bodycount in Uganda.

I’m quite sure there were apologists for the Spanish Inquisition, and I bet they had “genuine, heartfelt concerns,” too.

UPDATE: Wayne left this comment below, but I thought it deserved to be highlighted within the piece:

I stood next to Mr. Knight in 1998 at The National Press Club in Washington. He was there to tout a million dollar Pray Away the Gay advertising campaign called “Truth In Love.” Mr. Knight called this effort the “Normandy Landing in the Cultural War.”

The press conference featured John Paulk and Michael Johnston, the two ex-gay poster-boys of this time period.

In 2000, I photographed Paulk in a gay bar. In 2003, with the help of attorney Michael Hamer, we caught Johnston having gay Internet orgies. He disappeared after admitting a “moral fall”.

The bottom line is that Mr. Knight has paraded so-called “ex-gays” in front of America before. His so-called success stories did not pan out. His track record is abysmal.

Clearly, Mr. Knight has squandered his credibility on this issue and is the last person in America who should be saying that one can go from gay to straight. His own very public activism strongly suggests otherwise.

Mr. Knight must believe people are either stupid or have amnesia. However, many of us remember the fraud he perpetrated in 1998.

To try to pull the same craven and cynical publicity stunt in 2010, suggests a man with few scruples, a capacity for intellectual dishonesty and an addiction to propaganda that neatly fits into his warped world view.

Mr. Knight, is it not time you tiptoe off the public stage before you further humiliate yourself and do more harm to your cause?

National Public Radio has terrific story on the role social conservatives have played in exporting anti-gay extremism in Uganda. According to NPR:

Jim Naughton, a former canon in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., says their [Conservative Evangelical] message plays one way in the U.S., but differently in a place like Uganda. And they should have known.

“If you go to countries where there’s already a great deal of suspicion and maybe animosity towards homosexuals, and begin to tell people there, ‘Well, actually these people are child abusers, they’re coming for their children, that they’re the scourge that is being deposited on you by the secular West,’ you’re gonna get a backlash.” Naughton says it’s like “showing up in rooms filled with gasoline, and throwing lighted matches around and saying, ‘Well, I never intended fire .‘ “

Many U.S. evangelicals, including Lively, say they are “mortified” by the death penalty provision. Naughton doesn’t buy it.

“I think if they were mortified, they would have been mortified immediately,” he says. “Instead they were mortified — oh, two, three months into the campaign against this thing, when it was getting real traction.”

Megachurch pastor Rick Warren is a case in point. Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, has extensive ties with religious leaders in Africa, including Uganda. Initially, he refused to condemn the bill. Finally, two months after the bill was introduced, he urged pastors in Uganda to oppose it.

“We are all familiar with Edmund Burke’s insight, ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,’ ” Warren began. He explained his silence by saying, “It is not my role to interfere with the politics of other nations,” then stated that the bill “is unjust, it’s extreme, and it’s un-Christian.”

If Warren was slow to condemn the bill, other Christian conservatives have yet to do so, says Warren Throckmorton, who teaches psychology at Grove City College and has been monitoring U.S. evangelical response. He says some of the Christian groups most publicly tied to Uganda have been the quietest. Joyce Meyer Ministries, Oral Roberts University, the College of Prayer in Atlanta — all have close ties and declined to express reservations about the death penalty.

“Silence is often interpreted as consent,” says Throckmorton, who is himself a conservative evangelical. “So I think those kinds of responses may lead those individuals in Uganda to think that perhaps what [they're] doing really is according to the evangelical faith.”

The “culture war“, now more than 30 years old – today is far from the obscure reference cloaked and made fun of by the little quotation marks which try to create the impression that the culture war is a euphemism and not really a war at all. The truth is very different, because when people’s lives are destroyed through the actions of other people – even people on the other side of the planet, even without the use of conventional weapons – and when people die - it is a war in every real sense of the word.

Far from fading out over time, it is a war that has escalated if anything – and now employs advanced weapons such as the internet, science, medicine, psychology and multimedia – along with more traditional hardware like covert operations, surveillance, intelligence, counter-intelligence, propaganda, politics, dirty tricks, entrapment, investigative journalism, expose’s, espionage, infiltration – and denial. (Read More)

No one seems to want to touch the daunting task of defending Scott Lively** with a ten foot pole, but Don Feder thinks The New York Times should really stop being so mean to his buddy Don Schmierer.  In this piece, he quotes Larry Jacobs of the World Congress of Families regarding Schmierer’s excursion to Uganda:

Don Schmierer and two other evangelicals from the United States spoke in Uganda last March.  In the course of their remarks, they discussed the ability of individuals to mend broken family relationships, change destructive behaviors, and to leave the homosexual lifestyle.  Claiming their pro-family advocacy provoked anger, which led to the introduction of the Ugandan legislation,The Times charged, “You can’t preach hate and not accept responsibility for the way that hate is manifested.”

Jacobs responded: “Don Schmierer is a gentle counselor and an inspired teacher with more than four decades of experience in helping people overcome addictions, rebuild their lives, repair their relationships and restore their families.  Don provides wise counsel and advice for parents, with special insights on the relationships of fathers and their sons.  Because he believes in a Biblical worldview and thinks homosexuality is not genetic, The Times insists that he’s responsible for the Ugandan legislation, (a proposed law categorically denounced by every pro-family leader I’m aware of and Don himself).”

“Anyone that spends time listening to Schmierer or reading his materials, can easily see that his entire ministry is built on loving and helping homosexuals (and heterosexuals), not hating them.  As Don says himself, some of the nicest people he’s met around the world have been homosexuals.  After each of Don’s presentations, many homosexuals offer their thanks for his wise counsel and testimonies on how his guidance helped them.”

In other words, “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!  SHE’S BEEN THROUGH SO MUCH!“

Right.

First of all, it’s not Schmierer’s beliefs about gay people that we’re concerned with.  Being an American means that you are free to be as ignorant as you please.  We’re concerned with his actions.  Secondly, Don Schmierer’s entire life’s mission is directly in contrast to “loving and helping homosexuals.”  Ex-gay leaders love homosexuals like pedophiles love The Jonas Brothers.  Thirdly, did Schmierer, as quoted by Jacobs, really use the “some of the nicest people I’ve met have been homosexuals” construction?  I know that old white people can be really dumb about these sorts of things, but that statement is, in and of itself, bigoted.  Growing up in the South, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard an older white person say “I’m not racist, some of my best friends are black!”, as if it’s some sort of accomplishment.  Schmierer’s quote is the same construction, just updated for the purposes of discriminating against gay people.  He might as well have said, “We don’t think he deserves any rights, but we love our interior designer, and he’s a homosexual!”  Finally, who are we supposed to think the “many homosexuals” are who savor Schmierer’s loving guidance?  Because I know “many homosexuals,” and I don’t know one who would bear the indignity of listening to such drivel for any purposes besides mocking or monitoring the opposition.

Feder also quotes Jacobs saying this:

“The Times ugly attack on Schmierer is typical of the growing movement to intimidate and ultimately silence any who dissent from the gay agenda, including the activists working to preserve marriage.  Instead of discussing the nature and consequences of homosexuality, The New York Times says the debate is closed, and any who object, hate homosexuals and want to harm them.”

Well, the debate really is closed, at least in well-informed nations.***  When you have a struggle between opposing worldviews where exactly one side can defend its claims without resorting to age-old bigotry, discrimination, dogma and appeals to faulty translations of unprovable religious claims, you end up where we are now.  We still have to keep plugging away to correct their lies about the “nature and consequences” of homosexuality for as long as their ideas still hold sway over portions of the population, but we know, by looking at the data, that their discriminatory propaganda reaches fewer and fewer people in the West every year.  Welcome to 2010.  Put more bluntly:  We’re very sorry your ideas are laughable to rational people and, quite frankly, suck, but that’s really not our problem, and it’s not The New York Times’ problem.

Don Schmierer is a sentient being, as far as we know, and he made a conscious choice to visit Uganda with the likes of Scott Lively.  To quote a famous guy, he’s reaping what he’s sown.

(h/t GayUganda)

*Looka me, Jeremy, I made a pun before you did.

**How would you go about defending a man who handed a gun to genocidal maniacs anyway?  I wouldn’t know where to start.

*** This, of course, is why Christian Conservatives are opening so many franchise operations in the Third World.  They know, on some level, that their fight is lost among the educated.  They have nothing to offer thinking people.  So they scamper away to impoverished nations and fill their heads with their propagandistic lies in a desperate attempt to get there before modernity does.  It’s cynical, it’s manipulative, and it’s immoral, because they prey on people who actually do need their help, but instead they offer brainwashing and the distracting opiate of false hope.  Meanwhile, poverty continues, disease continues, hunger continues, AIDS gets worse (often because of the policies promoted by the Christian Conservatives).  It’s really beyond me how these people are able to claim moral authority over anything anymore.