Considering vast (and frankly odd) amount of time he spends talking about us, no wonder Tony Perkins thinks we're 'special'

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03/27/2015

by Jeremy Hooper

Family Research Council's exceedingly anti-gay president offers this take on Indiana's license-to-discriminate law:

[Tony Perkins]

Bully. Their whole movement is built around bullying. The license-to-discriminate bills, like all anti-LGBT policies, constitute bullying through actions. But even this tweet, with its oft-repeated canard, is a form of bullying in which Perkins changes words in order to put those pesky gays in their place. "STOP SQUIRMING AND LET ME DIMINISH YOUR RELATIONSHIP BEFORE I DEMEAN YOU AT MY PLACE OF BUSINESS!"

The truth, of course, is that the basic rights and protections afforded to homosexuality and gay people as we dance through life are no more "special" than the basic rights and protections afforded to heterosexuality. Straight people have a right to live and love and marry and serve and patronize and rent and apply and engage with society in all of the myriad ways that one engages with his or her society. Gay people have the same right. No American taxpayer deserves to be unfairly penalized in public life simply because of who he or she chooses as a sex partner and/or spouse. There is nothing "special" about this. it is simple. It is decent. It is something most of us assumed we were moving beyond, only to find social conservatives of 2015 rebooting debates from the 1950's.

Dismissing our sexuality as "behavior" and the associated rights/protections as "special" is just the adult form of the "macho" locker room bully who picked on the scared gay kid in the back when all he was trying to do was keep his head down and get dressed in peace. Anti-gay people spend their whole lives trying to other" us. Tony Perkins has built his entire national profile around it.

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