Pity poor Wal-Mart

Pity poor Wal-Mart. In the age of envy anyone successful gets attacked by both the extremist on the Right and on the Left. First, ignorant socialists in Chicago went on a Wal-Mart bashing spree passing a law to force it to pay higher wages than it's competitors. A move that could well mean Wal-Mart leaving the city (which I advise they do). Of course that hurts the shoppers there who tend to have below average wages. It never stops amazing me how truly anti-poor people the socialists really are in practice despite all their rhetoric.

Now the Religious Right is going after Wal-Mart again. You may remember they were having fits because the retail giant sold copies of Brokeback Mountain in their video section. Well now the fundametalists are livid because Wal-Mart gave $25,000 to the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce -- obviously a business association. Certainly not all members of such chambers of commerce are even gay. But gays to Christians fundamentalists are like Jews to the Nazis and other socialists of the past. They are a target of their frothing-at-the-mouth hatred.

It always amazes at how utterly hateful Christians become toward gay men and women. They lose all touch with reason -- not that they had much to begin with --- when it comes to the topic. Now a fundamentalits fruitcake named PeterLaBarbera is screaming over this donation. One Christian publication wrote: "he is surprised Wal-Mart would make such a deal, given the fact that so many of their customers are God-fearing Americans."

What a blithering, babbling idiot. Obviously the bulk of the customers in the US at Wal-Mart are Americans. And last I check the approximately 15 million gay and lesbians in the US were Americans as well. Not that one should brag about it these days by the way. I'm trying to convince people I'm really Canadian since the accent is close enough to fake. Is this idiot trying to imply that gays in the US are not "Americans". And unfortunately for them, a lot of gays still buy into the god bullshit. LaBarbera is apparently trying to imply that one can't believe in God or be an American if one is gay. Obviously the man has his head stuck up his nether regions.

He gets worse, of course. No surprise there. He calls the gay Chamber of Commerce "extremist homosexual activists." A meaningless term when spit out by lunatic religionists. Why meaningless? Because to them every homosexual by defintion is an "extremists homosexual activist." It is part of the demonization process that the little minds on the Religious Right need to make the world simple enough for their followers to understand. There is light and darkness and everyone not in Christianist circles is a follower of the Devil.

I wonder if these people know exactly how stupid they really are. I don't know what else to call it. It's not ignorance per se. If it were it would be willful ignorance. They go out of their way to convince themselves of the absurd and hateful things they believe. They ignore all evidence to the contrary including the many gay people who sit in the pews with them.

Of course the real shame about these hateful people is what they do to their own children. The Klan can feel comfortable about their hatred for blacks and so the Nazis can feel comfortable about hating Jews. A Klanner knows he won't discover his son is black while the Nazis know they won't come home one day to discover their daughter is a Jew. But the fundamentalists never know for sure if their own children are gay. Many, many of them are. I once knew a whole group of PKs who were gay. PK is slang for "preachers kids". All of them came from fundamentalist homes. And certainly many of the most anti-gay figures on the Religious Right in America have discovered they sired homosexual children. Phyllis Schlafly did it. So did Alan Keyes. So did Dick Cheney. And that's hardly the tip of the iceberg. I could name numerous other prominent cases.

One of the saddest such stories took place not far from where I was living at the time. Mary Griffith was a fundamentalist Christian. One day she discovered that her beautiful, loving son was gay. She and her fellow church members made his life a living hell hoping to torment into him heterosexuality. They failed. Bobby Griffith tried to be straight. He tried to understand why he was gay but he couldn't. Take this passage from the diary he kept: "I can't ever let anyone find out that I'm not straight. It would be so humiliating. My friends would hate me. They might even want to beat me up. And my family? I've overheard them....They've said they hate gays, and even God hates gays, too. Gays are bad, and God sends bad people to hell. It really scares me when they talk that way because now they are talking about me."

One night Bobby went for a walk. He crossed over the highway and watched the traffic passing below him as he stood on the overpass. As a huge semi tractor trailor speed down the road he jumped off the bridge in front of it. The torment these loving Christians inflicted on him was over.

Mary Griffith was destroyed emotionally. She had believed in her church and the vile, vicious god that it preached. She was sure that what she was doing would "save" Bobby from his sins. Instead she realized she helped drive him to his death. This crises woke her from the intellectual coma that her faith had placed her in. She left the church and no longer believes in this god either. But for Bobby it was too late. The book that tells her story, Prayers for Bobby, is heart breaking. It angered me and brought me to tears.

Can't these people see what their hate is doing to America? Can't they see what there hate is doing to their own families? I fear many of them do see this and they enjoy it. They are glad another "faggot" died. They enjoy the pain inflicted on grieving families. If you wonder why I see these people as moral monsters remembers Prayers for Bobby. I'll never forget it. And it is one reason I won't give an inch to the anti-gay bigots I run across -- no matter who they are. Am I angry? You bet I am. When people are being hurt I get angry. If you don't then what's wrong with you?