Ben, while I agree with your anger and frustration, I
don’t think that any condemnation of violence against gays from Bush,
Robertson, et al, will have any meaning. Acts of extreme, horrifying violence
like this or the murder of Matthew Shepard are met with near unanimous
revulsion. You won’t find many people who are sympathetic to the
perpetrators.
But when a 50 year old woman is in a terrible car
accident and her “partner” of 10 years is forcibly removed from the hospital
room because she is not “immediate family,” how is that not an act of
violence?
When companies deny the benefits to employees in a same
sex relationship that they would an employee in a straight relationship, how
is that not an act of violence?
Bush and his cohorts deserve blame for the climate of
intolerance, violence, and hate. Bush kills to solve problems, whether those
problems are in the prisons of Texas or the soil of Iraq. He brazenly
perpetuates racism and homophobia by embracing the Christian fundamentalists
and speaking at such despicable schools as Bob Jones University (which until
very recently banned interracial dating).
Bush’s Christian Right friends, for all their enmity against the
terrorists, sometimes sound remarkably like them. There are too many quotes
from Falwell, Robertson, etc. to list (not to mention quotes from such
powerful people as Helms, Lott, and Santorum), but I will leave you with this
recent statement from celebrity evangelical and philanderer Jimmy Swaggart.
"I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I'm gonna be
blunt and plain, if one ever looks at me like that I'm gonna kill him and tell
God he died. In case anybody doesn't know, God calls it an abomnation [sic].
It's an abomnation [sic]! It's an abomnation [sic]!"
Sure is, scumbag.