Yesterday afternoon, I listened to a Christian radio appearance in which Peter LaBarbera, longtime anti-LGBT activist, twice claimed that people like him who oppose LGBT rights for a living are being treated the way the Nazis treated the Jews. Here's one of the two clips, which Right Wing Watch also ended up capturing:
LaBarbera's meaning is not really open for interpretation. People are quite familiar with how Nazis treated Jews; it doesn't take much explanation. In fact, those crimes against humanity were so heinous that most modern commentators stay away from ever making even a minor Nazi comparison. There is even a principle known as Godwin's Law which speaks to the perils of such equations during the heat of debate.
But now look at how Peter responded to me when I tweeted out the link to his radio appearance:
Even worse, look what he said to gay, Jewish writer David Cary Hart, who took personal exception to the crude comparison:
Would "NEVER minimize the Holocaust"? But you did, Peter. Already. That's the whole point. That's why we are responding.
And back to how he replied to me: Who used the word "hate"? Not me. I simply repeated what Peter himself claimed, and I said it was disgusting. Because it was. Yet Peter's response, in typical anti-LGBT activist fashion, is to first claim that his verbatim audio is somehow taken out of context ("half-truths + outright lies") before resorting to asides about supposed demonization ("propaganda that intentionally + cruelly dehumanizes opponents"). As if we are LGBT activists (i.e. actual LGBT people with real lives, real families, and a real need for rights) are just bored or something so we need to make up stuff about a man from Naperville, Illinois.
And Peter continued the trend in several more replies to several other Twitter users:
Because that's how people like Peter always response when we simply present their own words back at them. It's always a game of "Who? What? Me?" The rhetoric is always framed as simple discussion, even when it culminates, as it most often doesn, in a scenario where gay people are denied of all our rights and "changed" into a usually celibate creature known as an "ex-gay."
Which makes me wonder if Peter, to name just one person, genuinely does lack the self-awareness to see himself in an accurate light. There are very few people who know anything about "culture war" politics who would consider Peter to be a mainstream policy analyst. That's why you don't really see Peter on Fox News or at big conferences like the Values Voter Summit; his own team understands that his rhetoric is just too over-the-top for even groups like NOM or the Family Research Council. His intention might be right in line with those groups, but his willingness to say downright nasty things makes him a non-starter for more pragmatic politicos. I actually assumed he liked his niche role as the man who refuses to talk strategically and who instead goes for the rhetorical jugular.
But yet even Peter is playing the "I simply disagree" card. The man who quite literally likened our reasonable pushback against his discriminatory advocacy to one of the most shocking genocides in modern history apparently believes he is somehow the victim here. He is the one who is being "dehumanized," in his view, even though he has literally spent the past two decades of his life building his career around the downright dehumanization of LGBT people.
Which brings me back to whether there really is some sort of a correlation between being really anti-LGBT and being thoroughly lacking in self-awareness. I'm just using Peter as one example here, since this one is recent and there is such incongruity between his vicious quote bank and his attempt to justify his life's work as mere political disagreement. However, this lack of self-awareness is quite definitive of the anti-LGBT, anti-equality movement. That's why you always see them misframing situations so that they come off like the good guys. From saying "marriage is under attack" when they are really talking about their own desire to keep come couples unwed to claiming "religious freedom" when they are really referring to a business owner's desire to flout nondiscrimination laws, theirs is a political movement that refuses to take responsibility for just about anything. Most of us assume that this is all strategic and the lack of public responsibility/accountability is so they can continue the ruse that opposing LGBT people is really "protecting the family." But could it be something beyond that, at least in some cases? Have some of these professional voices of inequality bought so fully into the work that they really no longer have the bandwidth to accurately assess what they say and do? Does being aggressively hostile to LGBT rights, at least for an extended period of time in a public way, eventually chip away the part of your conscience that deals with self-reflection? Does stumping for discrimination demand delusion?
I would ask Peter, but he'd surely just wonder aloud why I, the corrupt warden of a modern gulag, am so viciously interrogating innocent ol' him for the crime of picking daisies while singing "Kumbaya."