Last night I read a news article on Pinknews about some bright spark who has claimed in a press release that there is a direct link between the gay rights movement and an increase in gun crime.
Gay rights are responsible for gun crime?
Apparently this man, a certain Robert Peters - called a "morality campaigner" - is the president of Morality in Media, an organization founded in the early 1960's to "combat pornography".
Apparently in its latest crusades it has tried to ban "Cosmopolitan" magazine from store shelves and started (yet another) frivolous 'wear-a-ribbon-for...' campaign against pornography.
I'm sorry, but that is just sooo nineties. We already have ribbons for breast cancer awareness, suicide awareness, and a dozen others I can't even think of right now - so if this keeps up, bored conservative housewives will have different colored ribbons to wear for every day of the week.
My, my - what a worthwhile calling, truly noble. I mean, can you think of anything more worthy of your time than saving the endangered "Moral-osaurus"? Hurry, people, this is urgent - it is dying out! Where can I buy a ticket? I want to watch.
Get real, folks.
Apparently Peters claims that the recent decision of the Iowa Supreme Court to legalize gay marriage in the state is part of the "damage" inflicted on society which is leading to pedophilia and STDs, among others.
Funny, I thought pedophilia was a separate issue from homosexuality, considering the recent and much publicized scientific study which found it was primarily a heterosexual affliction. And are STD's not freely available to anybody, regardless of whether or not you are GLBT or heterosexual - or even have sex at all? After all, HIV/AIDS doesn't care if you're gay, straight, celibate or have a thing for shapely feet, are black, white, pink or purple with blue dots - or which party you vote for. How interesting.
Aside from all the Paul-Cameron-inspired tripe doing the rounds in right wing circles the past 30 odd years about GLBT people following "a suicidal lifestyle", being a "curable disease", and homosexuality being spread from toilet seats or via those sneaky gays "recruiting children" - and of course, being a "threat to the family" and "civilization" - now they blame gun crime on gay people as well.
It's not the first time, and it probably won't be the last. But, well, I suppose some size-queens I know would say that depends on the definition of the word 'gun'.
Interestingly enough just last month, US anti-gay group Exodus (which has affiliates in South Africa) took center-stage at an anti-gay rally in Uganda intended to incite yet more violent anti-gay hate. There, a member of its board bizarrely blamed the 1994 Rwandan genocide on gay people as well. How these idiots arrived at these totally absurd and baffling conclusions is anybody's guess. Perhaps they attended the same bigotry and misinformation classes in college? Apparently we GLBT folk really do get around. Well, well, well.
Seems these people might just have reason to fear us after all? I mean, if gay people are packing enough heat to be responsible for recent spikes in gun crime as this "rocket scientist" claims, then people might have reason to wonder. Say all the queens go around carrying .38 Specials in their little man-bags and the butches swagger through town with shooting irons at their sides - or if I went shopping carrying a mini-gun (in pink to go with my outfit)? If it were a GLBT characteristic or even a gay stereotype if you will, to walk around intimidating people with fire-arms, we must really be dangerous folk! We all know this is far from the truth - about as far from it as these fantastic postulations are from sanity and truth.
It would be very interesting to see any (and I mean ANY) facts Mr. Peters might have gathered to arrive at his burning conclusion, or presumably to substantiate it?
However, if this truly was the case, then surely leading homophobic figures would've been long extinct and the "culture war' as they call it (and blame on us for existing in the first place) would've been a good deal more violent, a lot less one-sided - and not to mention, long over?
But seriously, this guy must take the public for complete idiots if he thinks they will believe his ridiculous theory - but the trouble is, it is the idiots who are likely to!
Wait until the rest of the religious right bodies hear of it and take it up - then, as they say in good old Afrikaans - 'the dolls will start dancing'. Trouble is, they will probably get it all wrong, just like all the other "scientific facts" they have distorted from the work of credible researchers or quoted directly from Paul Cameron to spread lies and hate against GLBT. But then, in America anything is possible.
After all, they have the Westboro Baptist Church over there, who chant at the funerals of GLBT people that "Matthew Shepard is in Hell" and call the British queen a 'whore' (and then complain that they have been prevented from entering the UK to protest gay rights). And don't forget that Rick Warren, the man largely responsible for mentoring the anti-gay hate movement in Uganda and bolstering the rise of the "Kill the Gays Bill", was invited to speak at Obama's inauguration.
I'm not bashing Obama - not at all. It's possible that he wasn't aware of Warren's involvement in the looming genocide in Uganda, and in point of fact, it's preferable to think such. The alternative would be too disturbing to contemplate.
In the distant past all manner of things have been blamed on GLBT people - from droughts and other natural disasters to the collapse of civilizations. They haven't quite pinned the disappearance of Atlantis on us yet, but I'm sure it is only a matter of time. As others, I am reasonably sure it was a giant meteor that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and not the GLBT rights movement.
Among the classic comments on this news article was the following which to my mind simply forms the ideal response to all this "moral" claptrap proliferating the relentless attack on GLBT rights and freedoms and dignity. It may also shed some light on that little question 'where will it all end?':
"I live in Holland, by quite a lot of Americans considered a very immoral country (drugs, same-sex marriage, euthanasia) and we haven't had that many mass murders lately. The last ones occurred during WWII, when we were occupied by people with strong convictions about wrong, right and how to deal with them." (Comment by Har Davids — April 21, 2009 @ 12:31)
I couldn't have said it better myself.
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-12089.html
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This is precious Chrissy! Nobody could have said it better! What will the bigots conjure up next - maybe it was the gays that dropped atomic bombs on Japan LOL
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