When I was a little kid, I really wanted a rock tumbler. I remember looking through the JC Penney catalog and telling my mom that I hoped Santa would bring me one for Christmas. My mom said something about the tumbler using too much electricity and Santa never came through.
I’d basically forgotten about this unfulfilled wish until I read about Scott Esk, a Tea Party Republican running for the 91st District seat in the Oklahoma House. He also has a wish that involves rocks. However, while my wish was to make the river rocks around my family’s backyard into shiny gems, his wish is to use those rocks to kill gay people.
That’s right, folks. In 2014, a candidate for office is publicly endorsing stoning gay people to death. Because God. And also because he’s a terrible person.
Granted, he doesn’t have any gay-stoning plank in his platform, but he still made a public pronouncement via Facebook a while back. His declaration was in response to Pope Francis saying, basically, “Gays? Meh.”
So Esk posted a couple of Bible verses he said advocated stoning gay people. And someone asked him if he was seriously advocating death to gays. “I think we would be totally in the right to do it,” Esk posted. “That goes against some parts of libertarianism, I realize, and I am largely libertarian, but ignoring, as a nation, things that are worthy of death is very remiss.”
Totally in the right to kill homos, eh? Very remiss, indeed.
But don’t worry. If elected, Esk won’t make this a priority.
“I never said I would author legislation to put homosexuals to death, but I didn’t have a problem with it,” he said, according to the Inquisitr.
See? I mean, he might co-sponsor such a bill, but he’s not going to do the hard work of writing it or anything.
“I know what was done in the Old Testament and what was done back then was what’s just,” he continued. “And I do stand for Biblical morality.”
I don’t know if you’ve read the Old Testament, but let me just tell you, it’s super-violent, super-shitty toward women and basically a blueprint for a world no sane person would want to live in. But to Esk, it’s apparently paradise and we should base our laws on Old Testament justice, where women and children were killed with impunity …
Oh, wait. Actually, considering the number of women and children who die at the hands of men in this country, especially men with guns, I guess we already do that. But that apparently doesn’t go far enough for Esk.
This is problematic considering that, according to reports, Esk is currently separated from his wife. Which means he might well be heading toward divorce. And we all know that God hates divorce.
Apparently the whole “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” doesn’t apply so long as you’re doing the Lord’s work by killing the gays.
The good news is that the backlash against Esk has been swift. Even a blogger for the National Review Online wrote, “So, there we have it: 2014’s first nominee for the Todd Akin Toes-on-Tonsils Award.” Let’s hope that Esk gets his ass kicked in his primary election June 24.
D’Anne Witkowski has been gay for pay since 2003. She’s a freelance writer and poet (believe it!). When she’s not taking on the creeps of the world, she reviews rock and roll shows in Detroit with her twin sister and teaches writing at the University of Michigan.