The coming "gay marriage witch hunt"

There's something weirdly fascinating about the contradictions in the deeply conservative world view.

There's a long-standing meme, for instance, that "liberals" are in favor of victimhood status for everyone but Protestant white males. The conservative rejoinder is to jeer at liberals' purported bleeding hearts, dripping with guilt.

That's why it is extremely funny to hear about the coming gay-marriage witch hunt. The article quotes Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council:

“This New McCarthyism demands, ‘Do you now think or have you ever thought that marriage should remain the union of a man and a woman?’ Answer incorrectly, and watch your career be taken from you and your reputation smeared on a thousand websites.”

I sense a mighty wind in the offing ...

Many of these fears burst out into the open earlier this year when Brendan Eich, the CEO of Mozilla, was run out of his position after it was revealed that he had donated money to the anti-gay marriage cause in California. Although some supporters of gay rights even thought the Eich affair was handled poorly, it sent a signal “that you have to be politically correct if you want to attain a higher position,” said Warner Todd Huston, a conservative activist and writer.

“That is the fear, that traditional American values are being criminalized as opposed to simply being out of fashion,” he said.

There it is: we have achieved "overblown"!

There's no criminalization of so-called traditional American values. There's ostracism, but being a social outcast isn't a criminal offense.

Calling out Huston's absurd overreaching isn't terribly productive, though. It's small ball. Conservative hypocrisy and self-pity — now that's a big, fat, ripe target.

Is the "traditional American values" crowd really going to play the victim card? This is the same bunch that declared homosexuality a mental disorder, non-heterosexuals to be evil, and passed laws criminalizing homosexual behavior in the states. Most of those laws are no longer functioning, but not because the ones who demanded them had a change of heart: it took courts with a healthy respect for the Constitution to strike them down. Outside the law, non-heterosexuals suffer beatings and killings merely for being who they are. It must be quite gratifying to the merciful God the traditional American values cohort worships that the lessons of His Holy Writ are used to justify that violence.

Non-heterosexuals have had plenty of experience being victimized in the name of "traditional American values". The proponents of those values will have to undergo a hell of a lot more than opprobrium to merit being called "victims" themselves. When you find marauding bands of non-heteros randomly curbing Christian fundamentalists, give us a call.

Yo, Tony, you're worried about your reputation being "smeared on a thousand websites"? What, as opposed to smearing thousands or millions of your countrymen — your fellow human beings — as mental defectives and moral obscenities? You think being called a bigot comes anywhere close to being called a depraved monster?

You and your protesting compatriots have some nerve. You call yourselves principled and righteous and arrogate the privilege of judging who is and isn't fit to be part of polite society, then you cry foul when the rest of us decide you're wrong and repudiate your condemnatory ways. Please, spare us your plaints.

Maybe from now on you'll actually take to heart the admonition, "Judge not, lest ye be judged."