Both Sides Are Just As Bad?

[Content note: eliminationist rhetoric]

So says North Carolina's Pastor Charles Worley, after the passing of the state's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage*:

"I figured a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers, but I couldn't get it passed through Congress. Build a great, big, large fence — 150 or 100 mile long — put all the lesbians in there, fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals and have that fence electrified so they can't get out…And you know what, in a few years, they'll die out."

Just like when, right after that ban on practicing Christianity passed, that one Gay Rights Organization Director gleefully told his members that next on the Gay Agenda was a plan to round up all the Christians, put them on a ship, and sink it to the bottom of the ocean, all to a chorus of "amens" by LGBT people.

In all seriousness, I am fully aware that many people who oppose full equality for LGBT people do not agree with, and might even publicly condemn, Worley's statement.

My point here is twofold.

This sort of rhetoric is not rare. They way homosexuality is discussed at Family Scholars Blog (where I guest blog) is simply not the way it's discussed and debated in the vast majority of venues that I, and many other LGBT people, have participated in.

And two, it is a false moral equation to compare this sort of eliminationist, hostile rhetoric, backed as it sometimes is by religious organizations that cry "anti-Christian bigotry" whenever the state grants even the tiniest concession to LGBT advocates, to when LGBT people and organizations call anti-equality advocates (accurately or inaccurately) bigots.

*If you watch the linked video, note how the newscaster warns that the video of the preacher speaking "might be offensive to some." 

Might be.

To some.

Ah yes. All of us over-sensitive PC Gone Too Far types who object to things like exterminating groups of people.

Cross-posted: Family Scholars Blog