Paranoid Homophobia

I was very struck by two recent reports where some good old fashioned fear mongering seemed to be going on.

The one is from the Roman Catholic Bishop of Glasgow, the other from a prominent State level politician in the US. Similarities are striking.

First Representative Sally Kern from Oaklahoma (or should that be Oaklahomo).

She thought she was speaking before 50 people only but in fact her words were captured by You Tube.

Here's a flavour:

There's a great conspiracy out there where gay people are a greater danger to the US than terrorism and (apparently) history demonstrates that any country that embraces equality for gay people will eventually meet its end.

You can see the actual talk on You Tube and its really worth watching if you want a laugh.

There's quite a few of them that have different presentations. Some have been put to music, made into a poem, one has a version where the word gay is replaced with the word 'troll' for effect and so on.

Here are the links to a selection.

Victory Fund version (with excerpts from the talk in its full paranoid glory and pictures and captions from the Victory Fund).

Troll version. Very funny, you'll love this one.

The Ballad of Sally Kern - a worthy effort at poetry. It ends with some references to Hitler and the Nazi time. A helpful and sobering reminder to where can head when some people are referred to as a cancer and the greatest threat to our society by their mere existence.

Ellen de Generes does a good turn on her show - it's quite funny and she tries to contact Sally to try to put her right on a few issues.....

Finally 'Stop Hate' which links up the words of hate that Sally Kern uses to the strings of murders of LGBT people in recent times in the US.

The second example is that of Roman Catholic Bishop Joseph Devine. He's also seeing a plot, a conspiracy perpetrated by gays to do untold harm to society and our common values. Here's Pink News' report.

Gays even sink so low as to want to remember the gay people held in concentration camps in Hitler's Germany. Apparently. Really it verges on a form of selective holocaust denial.

There is a common thread to all of this and I think that some of the references to Hitler are apposite, if a little stretched.

We are seeing a phenomenon of denial of the humanity of one section of the community. We know where this leads if unchallenged.

Thankfully there are people who are willing to stand up. Some of them are to be seen in the You Tube links above.

I include in this Pastor Wright, longtime preacher at Barack Obama whose sermons are a little surprising in their anti-American content.

(It's easy to decry his sermons except for the fact that he is actually slap bang in the middle of the Old Testament prophetic tradition of lambasting your cultural safety zones. And - it is reported - that he also supported equality for LGBT people and preached this within the milieu of the Christian Church).

The last word is a very eloquent, unadorned You Tube piece on the dangers of Homophobia in Government.

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