Anti-gay talker Steve Deace lets LGBT movement know: we're about to sue churches, apparently

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04/16/2014

by Jeremy Hooper

In truth, the consumer fraud legal case involves an organization, not a church. And no one is trying to hide it. For the past year-and-a-half, the Southern Poverty Law Center's lawsuit against Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) for allegedly violating New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act when it provided its so-called "conversion therapy" services to impressionable gay clients has been firmly imprinted on public record for consumption by anyone with an ability to access Google. We are proud of rejecting an offensive form of "therapy" that all credible scientific outlets (and the Republican governor of New Jersey) reject as fraudulent and/or dangerous.

But when you take that piece of information, as relayed by anti-gay pastor Jim Garlow, and then filter it through another anti-LGBT radio host, Steve Deace, who is determined to make LGBT activists seem like "fascists" and the politically involved people who really overstepping religious bounds, this is how it comes out to supporters and the eleven social conservatives Deace tagged in the post:

[SOURCE]

Of course there isn't one grain of truth in the twisted version of facts that Mr. Deace's dangerous game of telephone is shouting out as reality. There isn't a credible LGBT activist or group with even much interest, much less a goal, in "targeting" any church's teachings. Sure, LGBT people who are committed to a particular faith might be advocating change from within the religious perspective to which they subscribe and that they hold dear. And yes, there are faith-centered LGBT groups that would like to see sweeping changes within the religious community overall. But there is not even the inkling of an effort to legally target churches for what they preach. I would think that would go without saying.

But these days, it apparently must all be said. The anti-LGBT far-right, dismayed by a sheer inability to win just about anything resembling a victory, has gone into a truly bizarre and somewhat frightening panics mode where they will say and do just about anything to make us look awful, if not evil. They now use words like "homo-fascist" and "jihad," and phrases "gay Gestapo," as if those are normal, okay things that people say in fair debate. They turn our most basic of stands in support of our selves and our families into supposed acts of aggression against them (because it's always about them). They, the crowd that has been using personally-held faith against our legal rights for decades now, have convinced themselves that we are coming for their religion. And they are now messaging all this out in the most hyperbolic ways imaginable, in hopes that they can turn this increasingly personal shotgun approach to animus into a new phase of their political movement.

The "homo-fascists" are going after churches? Sure, why not? After all, this is throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks-time. And should their games of telephone go from rhetorical viciousness to literal, in-the-streets aggression? Why that's just a "culture war" casualty, I guess.

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