Slacktivist, yet again, makes everything that much clearer. Writing about the homophobic astroturfing campaigning of the National Organisation for Marriage, he makes this perfect observation:
We could go through a point-by-point refutation of the ad’s innuendo about the Big Gay Stormtroopers menacing California doctors, Massachusetts parents and tax-free beach-front property managers in New Jersey, but it would be wrong to dignify such brazen BS by pretending that anyone shoveling this crap might even slightly believe it to be true.
So instead we’ll just stick with the two-word rebuttal of everything this ad darkly hints will come to pass down the slippery slope of equality: Fred Phelps.
Yes, that Fred Phelps. The military-funeral crashing leader of the inbred Westboro Baptist Church. You know, the “God Hates Fags” and “God Hates America” guy.
Or, more to the point here, the anti-gay bigot whose church’s freedom to preach his gospel of hate has never been threatened, circumscribed or interfered with despite the vicious and despicable things he’s made it his life’s work to go around saying at the worst possible times in the worst possible places.
So it turns out that the litigious old bastard has at least one useful social purpose. The unimpeded, undiminished work of his infamously evil anti-gay “ministry” emphatically disproves every Scary Story promoted by anti-gay religious groups who claim that recognizing marriage equality or including sexual orientation in existing hate-crime or anti-discrimination legislation will lead to Christian ministers being thrown in jail for saying they believe homosexuality is a sin.
“My freedom will be taken away,” says one woman in the NOM ad.
How so? She doesn’t say. But Fred Phelps’ freedom hasn’t been taken away, so we have to assume that this otherwise pleasant-seeming woman must be referring to her “freedom” to harass, slander and berate with greater intensity than anything Phelps has done.
…So there’s the two-word answer for every Tony Perkins or James Dobson or Damon Owens who makes up some dubious claim about being persecuted or punished or threatened or jailed or whatever for their anti-gay beliefs.
“I’m a California doct– ” Fred Phelps! He’s a free man. Are you worse than him? No? Then shut up, ‘kay?
I commend this approach to my readership.