Over the weekend, I suggested that we should not be afraid to define those against marriage equality. Dreher counters:
Dropping the "Bigot" Bunker-Buster doesn't seem like a promising strategy to me in a country in which 49 percent of the people think homosexuality is immoral, and in which a Mr. Nice Gay approach is slowly but steadily winning. But we'll see. If that's the way they go, the anti-SSM groups ought to make ads out of this footage of the way an enraged mob of No More Mr. Nice Gays chased peaceful Christians out of the Castro district; the Christians had to be accompanied by police officers for their own safety.
In fact, I was not in any way arguing that we should yell "bigot!" even more loudly. I was suggesting that we keep making the positive constructive case for marriage equality - that it's socially unifying, that it fosters responsibility and family, that it encourages people to look after one another rather than relying on government, that it's humane, that it helps give troubled gay kids hope, that it prevents divorces, and on and on. But in this war, we should not always be the ones on the defensive. We can and should also point out the hypocrisy and history of our opponents.
Is it not somewhat bizarre that the Catholic church, which has perpetrated and covered up abuse, rape and molestation of children on a massive, global scale, should be financing a campaign that says that it is some kind of abuse that gay kids know that they can have a relationship one day like their parents'?
Is it not repulsive that a church like the Mormons, which taught for a majority of its existence that African-Americans were marked as damned by God and that no black person could be a Mormon, should now be a chief financier of a campaign to deny another minority civil rights? Are we not entitled to illuminate just how rotten these institutions are on these questions of children and civil rights? Are we not entitled to insist that the use of church funds to run clear political campaigns against minorities should result in an end to their tax-exempt status?
As for that "mob", it was a handful of Christianists who, not content with using democratic means to strip their fellow citizens of civil rights, decided to celebrate their victory by haranguing gay people as the bars closed in Castro Street the weekend after Prop 8. Please.
I would like to ask Rod if the gay mobs he feared would be showing up at his doorstep ever actually showed up. Or whether his own terror of homosexual orientation might have warped his grip on reality?