Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [35]
Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association even used the gay Nazi theory to protest a proposal to repeal the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, arguing that gay soldiers would be too mean. He explained:
Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders [sic] basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals.47
Thought Crimes
But what, exactly, you may be wondering, are the mean homosexuals doing to the Christians? With all the talk of “harassment” and “violence” and “discrimination” and “oppression,” you’d think that legions of demonic jackbooted gay thugs in leather chaps were rounding the poor Christians into concentration camps and peeing on them. Fortunately, the Christians have so far been allowed to roam free, but they are at dire risk from hate crime. Not hate crimes. No one is beating up Christians yet. The Christians are at risk from hate crime legislation, specifically the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, also known as the Matthew Shepard Act.
On October 7, 1998, two young men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, of Laramie, Wyoming, lured a third young man, Matthew Shepard, into their truck by posing as homosexuals. They robbed him of $30, smashed his face and skull with a huge .357 Magnum, and left him tied to a split-rail fence in the frigid Wyoming countryside. The bicyclist who found Shepard unconscious 18 hours later at first mistook him for a scarecrow. Shepard died five days later from severe brainstem damage without ever regaining consciousness.48 Members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, traveled to Casper, Wyoming, to picket Shepard’s funeral. They carried signs that read “Fag Matt in Hell” and “No tears for queers.”49
At the murder trial, McKinney’s lawyers presented the “gay panic” defense, arguing that Shepard’s sexual advances drove their client to temporary insanity. A former bartender helpfully testified that he too had knocked Shepard unconscious after being propositioned by him. The judge rejected the defense, and McKinney received two life sentences.
After the trial, President Clinton urged Congress to extend federal hate crime legislation to homosexuals, women, and people with disabilities, but the measure failed. Democrats continued to push for the extension but did not succeed until they captured control of the legislature. The House finally passed the Matthew Shepard Act in 2007.
The religious right responded as if the government had started rounding up Christians and burning down the churches. James Dobson explained that the “true intent” of the Matthew Shepard Act was to “muzzle people of faith” and warned, “If you read the Bible a certain way with regard to morality—you may be guilty of committing a ‘thought crime.’”50 Pat Robertson agreed that “if anybody speaks out about homosexuality, says it’s a sin, says it’s wrong, says it’s against the Bible, that individual would be charged with a quote, hate crime.”51 Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) clambered onto the “thought crime” band-wagon as well,52 but he couldn’t resist a rambling digression into a bestiality-necrophilia-pedophilia-fascism slippery-slope bonanza from the House floor, proclaiming:
You’d have to strike any laws against bestiality, if you’re oriented toward corpses, toward children, you know, there are all kinds of perversions, what most of us would call perversions. Some would say it sounds like fun, but most of us would say were perversions. . . . When you lose morality in a nation, you create economic instability leading to economic chaos.