Gay people. They’re just like Nazis, amirite?
What with their Pride parades and their drag queens and their wanting to get married and their Broadway musicals and their rainbow stickers plastered across their Subaru bumpers.
I mean if that doesn’t say “Heil Hitler,” I don’t know what does! At least that’s what Peter LaBarbera of Americans For “Truth” About Homosexuality thinks.
LaBarbera was a guest on the “Janet Mefferd Show” (a right-wing radio show, obviously) on Sept. 26 to discuss the Human Rights Campaign’s new report titled “Export of Hate,” a veritable who’s who of antigay extremists who have taken their hate abroad.
LaBarbera was featured in the report for “work” he’s done in Jamaica where he “urged Jamaican Christian conservatives not to repeal the country’s anti-sodomy law and told them that homosexuality is a choice and is associated with pedophilia.”
When asked by Mefferd if he’s received any pushback since the release of the HRC report, LaBarbera said, “It’s constant with us.” (Cue sad trombone.)
Huh. Go figure. I can’t understand why a group dedicated to portraying gay and lesbian people as subhuman perverts would receive any objection at all!
Maybe if LaBarbera claims that those subhuman perverts are also Nazis, people will stop complaining. Because who could possibly defend Nazis?
“We have to trust in God to protect us” from homos, LaBarbera tells Mefford. “But I do think they’re doing to us what the Nazis did to the Jews. You know, they’re intentionally demonizing.”
Huh. LaBarbera and I must have read very different books about the Nazis and the Holocaust. Because I am having a lot of trouble with this comparison. Sure, you could argue that HRC and other critics (why, hello there!) are “demonizing” LaBarbera and his antigay friends. I think he’s wrong, and I think he’s a creep. But I’m not putting him on a train car to Bergen-Belsen except, perhaps, in a sick oppression fantasy in his head.
“This is all about demonizing because they know that it works,” he adds. “This demonization is just — it’s what’s been done to minorities in the past and, like I said, it’s what the Jews did to um, what the Nazis did to the Jews.”
Not only is his analogy offensive to both gays and to all of the other people who were oppressed and executed by the millions, but it is illogical. LaBarbera is a white male who identifies as heterosexual and Christian. He is hardly a minority. He’s basically won the identity lottery in America. So for LaBarbera to cry that he’s being “Holocausted” just because the rights of the LGBT minority are advancing despite his opposition is a really desperate attempt to play the victim here.
LaBarbera claims he is upholding “historic Judeo-Christian sexual morality.” He tells Mefferd, “The Bible calls homosexual behavior an abomination, so I suppose that means that God is the biggest hateful homophobic bigot of all. According to their ideology.”
Let me play devil’s advocate here. Just kidding, I don’t believe in the devil, and I don’t believe in God. So, instead, let me just answer this in response to LaBarbera’s assertion above: “Yup.”
If you use a sky god of your own invention, tailored to hate all of the same things you hate, and hide behind said god in order to justify saying things like, “[Gays are] doing to us what the Nazis did to the Jews,” then, yes: God is “the biggest hateful homophobic bigot of them all.” Because God is really just the you that you couldn’t possibly justify being if you didn’t have God to use as an excuse.
If I did believe in God, I bet that such shenanigans would make Him puke.