The gays are going to force us all into tolerating them, Or kill us. Or tolerance-camp us.

Something that requires a pre-emptive strike by the forces of decency…which will coincidentally take the form of policing the population for gayness, criminalizing gayness, and maybe forced reparitive therapy…in camps. And the occasional stoning to keep morale high.

Following the resignation of Mozilla president Brendan Eich, the wingnut talking heads have increased their outpouring of claims that public protest against discrimination is a sign that gays are the real persecutors.

Gays stifle dissent by protests and boycotts, therefore they’re fascists. Wingnuts don’t boycott anything, because freedom…unless it’s pertinent to gay people.

Gays are intolerant of intolerant Christians…and btw, you can’t be truly Christian and tolerant of gay marriage. So a sizable chunk of Christendom just vanishes.

Gay organizations are terrorists, because they make people afraid…not, you know, actual terrorists who issue violent threats, blow up stuff, and kill and beat people. But they’re going to, we are continuously assured, as soon as they have power. They’ll murder Christians and conservatives They’ll corrupt the youth and make them believe wrong things.

So let’s take this at face value, that this is a criticism of activists and extremists. But gay organizations aren’t all representative of all gay people, right? It’s not like they’d say the same thing of any homosexual person, regardless of whether or not they express themselves on the political stage? It’s not like the bundle of assertions made following the Mozilla dust-up are simply replays of an opt-repeated script? Surely, these critics would accept that premise, and a modicum of research won’t turn up an ongoing agenda of denying any legitimacy to the concept of homosexuality?

There is no acceptable form of homosexuality for these organizations. They’re a threat to children, and marriage equality is child abuse. The mere depiction of a homosexual couple as “normal” is Satanic propaganda.

They’re all child molestors for good measure.

Oh…and The Gay are a sinister cabal taking over the US and the world. Can’t forget that gem. Gays are Maoist Cultural Revolutionaries and Gestapo rolled into one.

Gayness is such a threat that it’s simultaneously a mental instability and a moral failing resultant from Satanic influence. As such, it’s wrong to support measures to control bullying of gay teens. Because obviously, the way to help the mentally ill is to ostracize and humiliate them until they’re willing to succumb to unreliable treatments with ethically dubious administrators.

So, again, let’s be forgiving. Let’s say, “it’s their opinion, their faith, who are we to make them configure their ideas and lives to our standard?”

Well, the appeals to civil liberty and free speech…to freedom as an ur-concept…do not apply to homosexuals, period. The declared existential threat to America/Christendom/the world justifies any means…and they just happen to have laws drawn up that quantify to those means, and are lobbying for them.

The criminalization of homosexuality in Nigeria and Uganda, were lobbied for by American ministries and anti-gay pundits like Scott Lively. Putin’s Russia in particular has been singled out for praise of its protection of civil liberty. There’s a conspiracy to make the world gay, and the people writing laws to criminalize homosexuality are the brave defenders of freedom…and all the individual homosexuals totally deserve what they get.

On the home front, they’ve had less success, thanks to the codification of civil liberties and the court system, but they keep trying: the “Don’t Say Gay bill” (Missouri House Bill 2051), many state-level constitutional definitions of marriage, up to the un-signed right-to-discriminate law in Arizona. When the legal structure bars the progress of such institutional dscrimination, they just claim it’s part of the great conspiracy, and fantasize about the glorious revolt they’ll lead.

*end of rant*

The linkage in this article represents slightly more than a month of declarations by anti-gay pundits. It is not even a comprehensive list, just a sampling, of what’s out there. The idea that the Mozilla case has changed the tenor of the argument is laughable, it’s just another situation in which the same care-worn claims are trotted out. And, as always, the perceived intolerance of “homosexual activists” is being used to justify an enormous legal and cultural structure that will banish homosexuality and homosexuals from society permanently. That they demand criminalization of homosexual acts, and praise nations in which there is not only criminalization, but stochastic violence against (perceived) homosexuals demonstrates that there’s no genuine interest in a market of opinions, or an agreement to disagree. The appeals to freedom of speech and civil liberty are two-faced at best, since the rest of the time they speak explicitly about how anyone that disagrees with them deserves no voice, no citizenship, and in some case, no recognition as an human being.

The only irony greater than their appeals to freedom are their invocation of fascist imagery to characterize homosexuals…all homosexuals, not just activists or politicians. Scott Lively is the most-often quoted individual in this post, and has an outsized share of the intellectual market amongst homophobes. He’s author of “The Pink Swastika,” which asserts that the NSDAP regime was an explicitly homosexual movement. His subsequent interviews and writings on the subject of homosexuality, including the justifications for things such as the Ugandan law he crafted, invoke the image of brutal gay cadres (in his imagery, male), their sexuality tied directly to their violence. This idea of bullies-soon-to-be-butchers has pervaded the anti-gay movement, and is the rallying point in justifying suppressing all expression of homosexuality*…which is eerily similar to the invocation of conspiracy and cultural infiltration the NSDAP itself used.

_{*more, accurately, all sexual expression outside of a very limited, gender-essentialist format.}

Addendum:

(H/T Charles)

Just a Reminder: The Campaign for Prop 8 Was Unprecedentedly Cruel

The tactics used by pro-Prop 8 campaigners were not merely homophobic. They were laser-focused to exploit Californians’ deepest and most irrational fears about gay people, indoctrinating an entire state with cruelly anti-gay propaganda. Early on, Prop 8’s supporters decided to focus their campaign primarily on children, stoking parents’ fears about gay people brainwashing their kids with pro-gay messages or, implicitly, turning their children gay.