When They Came for the Homosexuals… By Chris Hedges (author of American Fascists,)

[RedEarth]

On the morning of March 8 in Sioux Center, Iowa, two buses parked outside a hotel were found covered with anti-gay slurs, along with a hate-filled message on a piece of cardboard reading: “God does not love feary fags.”

The buses were transporting some 50 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students, along with supporters, on the start of a two-month trip to 32 Christian colleges with policies that discriminate against those who are not heterosexuals. The Equality Ride, as it is known, organized by Soulforce, had first traveled to Sioux Center to visit Dordt College, a school that counts “sexual activity with someone of the same gender” as possible grounds for “an employee’s discharge or a student’s dismissal.”

The harassment is not new. During a similar series of protests last year, someone in Cleveland, Tenn., scrawled “fags-mobile” on the side of the bus. Members of the Equality Ride have been arrested for trespassing, at the West Point military academy and elsewhere, and greeted at many of their stops with active hostility. The night before the buses were spray-painted with hateful slogans, three vehicles circled the hotel where the activists were staying to harass those inside.

The website has more on the ride, including pictures of the bus graffiti. But what is important is not this specific incident, or any other recent examples of public intolerance, but the seismic shift in public mood in much of the United States, a shift largely engineered by the radical Christian right. The Christian right has begun to strip gays and lesbians of their constitutional rights and render them second-class citizens. The gay rights movement, which made many gains over the past couple of decades, is reeling backward. And the mounting persecution of gays and lesbians is ominous not only for them but for the rest of society.

I spent two years reporting and writing “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” At the numerous gatherings I attended around the country, one of the driving forces and most effective mobilizing agents was the issue of sexuality. This mass movement, led by figures such as James Dobson, claims that tolerance of “alternative lifestyles” is eroding the American family. They describe “same-sex attraction” as a disease that can be cured. And they condemn all sexual love that is not heterosexual as an abomination in the eyes of God.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070311_when_they_came_for_the_homosexuals/

[BOSSHOG]

1. I would suspect they got their asses kicked

I agree with dobson, alternative lifestyles, like those lived by incestuous christians who divorce at will certainly do erode the American Family. And what is in God's eye is irrelevant in the land of the free. Please, zealots if you want to live in a theocracy, leave. I'll hold the border open for you.

[ThomCat]

2. Yes, they really are trying to stratify society

with themselves at the top and everyone else criminalized somehow. They want us (GLBT people) to be among the first that are criminalized, but don't think they plan to stop with us. They are trying to change the very nature of our nation to one in which you are required to be a concervative heterosexual fundamentalist christian.
x(

[Donnachaidh]

3. Good Morning America had a piece on *Godmen* this morning

And I really had to keep myself from vomiting while I watched it. It coincides with the thoughts in Hedge's piece:

"This cult of masculinity keeps all ambiguity, especially sexual ambiguity, in check. It fosters this world of binary opposites: God and man, the saved and the unsaved, the church and the world, Christianity and secular humanism, and male and female. There runs through this radical belief system a dread of disorder and chaos. The belief in a binary universe helps believers avoid confronting the confusion of human existence. Reality, when it is defined in these absolutes, is made predictable and understandable. All configurations of human life that do not conform to the rigid Christian model, such as homosexuality, are forms of disorder and tools of Satan and must be abolished. A world that can be predicted and understood, a world that has clear markers, can be managed and controlled. This petrified world of fixed, immutable and established roles is a world where people, many of them damaged by bouts with failure and despair, can bury their chaotic and fragmented personalities. They can live with the illusion that they are strong, whole and protected. Those who do not fit into these rigid categories, who are not subservient to dominant Christian males, must be proselytized, converted and “cured” through quack therapy."

These Godmen are lead by a comedian(???) and had meetings to *bring masculinity to their beliefs*? One of the high points of their meeting was bending a skillet with your hands?

These people are advocating a brute force that does NOT belong in any faith.