'Persecuted' Christians? Yeah, Right.

Reading an Associated Press article the other day about how white evangelical Christians feel marginalized and "persecuted," I tried my best -- really, I did -- not to scoff, and I failed. Then I tried my best not to get hot under the collar, and I failed at that, too.

From the article:

" 'The Bible says in this life you will have troubles, you will have persecutions. And Jesus takes it a step further: You'll be hated by all nations for my name's sake,' he said.

" 'Let me tell you,' the minister said, 'that time is here.' "

The pastor in question was a fellow called Richie Clendenen. He went on to spout this little gem:

"There's nobody hated more in this nation than Christians.... Welcome to America's most wanted: You."

A few days after reading that AP article, a new story broke across the Internet: A gunman slaughtered fifty people, and wounded fifty-three more, at Pulse, a gay club in Orlando. The bloodbath was the worst mass shooting so far in what has become an increasingly lengthy streak of similar events in this country.

The blood on the floor wasn't even dry when the Lt. Governor of Texas, tweeted this charitable sentiment, a quote from the New Testament and a sweet little encomium sure to warm the cockles of every Christian heart:

"Do not be deceived. God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows."

Such a tender and loving message. It was deleted four hours later, among a firestorm of criticism.

So, tell me again - exactly who is it that's being "persecuted?"

The nightclub shooter was identified as Omar Mateen. Authorities initially hinted that the shooting might have been a terrorist act. Based on what the shooter's father said, it seems they were right - but it wasn't an act of radical Islam terrorism. It was anti-gay terrorism, a frenzied burst of bloodshed that, according to Mateen's father, might have been rooted in the killer's rage at having spotted two men kissing in Miami weeks earlier.

You can view a report about what the shooter's father said here.

Additionally, reports had it that Mateen's ex-wife claimed he was "not very religious," and she further claimed that he had beaten her in the past. However, it also seems that Mateen had called 911 prior to the shooting to express his solidarity with ISIS.

So, are we to believe that Mateen (who evidently had a history of "mental instability" and violence) was not driven by faith-based hatred? Was it a political doctrine, rather than a religious dogma, that spurred Mateen to buy an assault rifle and use it to shatter and snuff out 103 lives?

Let's think about this for a moment. What if the shooting were, in some less obvious way, rooted (culturally, even if not religiously) in radical Islam? After all, the jihadists of ISIS have made quite the name for themselves with their killing, marauding, and wanton destruction. If Christians anywhere are being persecuted, it's by these guys -- not in America by two grooms wanting a cake, or a couple of brides wanting wedding photos.

ISIS kills all sorts of people. But they reserve some of their most cruel and spectacular atrocities for gays. Know what they do to gay men? They take gay men to the rooftops of tall buildings and throw them off. If their victims survive, the willing executioners of ISIS stone them to death. It's all too plausible that Sunday morning's act of insane homicidal violence did have some second or third-degree faith-related basis, some dogmatic justification in the back of the killer's mind. Maybe not; but you can see how one might think so. It's an easy formula to recite, because we have seen on too many occasions what you get when you combine God's theoretical hatred of gays with a putative expectation that His followers should do His dirty work in murdering them.

But whether religious or not in the killer's mind, there's a definite cultural motivation to harm and kill LGBTs, and it exists here as well as in countries that are proudly, potently homophobic. It's a free-floating bias that's continually stoked and sharpened by people claiming to be doing God's work. Whether it's a Jewish zealot crashing into a safe space for LGBT teens and blasting away, as happened in Tel Aviv in 2009, or Sunday morning's putatively secular killing spree at Pulse in Orlando, the blood on the floor belongs to people targeted and extinguished because of their sexuality.

Here's another data point: Police detained a 20-year-old man whose car was full of weapons and raw materials for the construction of bombs. He was on his way to Pride in Los Angeles -- a long way from his home state of Indiana. Yes, that Indiana, the state that has been a leader in the arena of the so-called "Religious Liberty" laws that are nothing but faith-based anti-gay prejudice wrapped in the language of the First Amendment.

All this comes back to the perpetrator of mass murder in Orlando because while the killer might or might not have been driven by religious condemnations of LGBT people, his reasoning might all too readily have been clouded and his mind darkened by exhortations to violence and carnage uttered by those who style themselves as pious. In 2013 Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar delivered a talk at a mosque in an Orland suburb in which he declared that "death is the sentence" for gays, saying its was nothing to be "embarrassed" about, and twisting his argument into all sorts of pretzel shapes to promote the idea that murdering GLBT individuals was an act of "compassion." Did those sentiments lodge in Mateen's mind? When an authority figure -- secular or religious -- tosses seed of hatred and violence, some of those seeds are going to germinate, possibly in minds that are already unbalanced. Did the patrons of Pulse reap carnage sown by a "holy" man committed to anti-gay violence? Do anti-gay politicians and religious leaders spout the toxic rhetoric they do with the knowledge that there will be mentally ill people out there to hear their words -- people liable to pick up guns and gather the components they need to manufacture IEDs?

Exhortations to kill come from all religious quarters, and LGBTs are too often the ones who are painted with the bull's eye. What one hears from Islamic extremists is not much different from what you hear "kill the gays" Christian pastors saying. And given the way American evangelicals have brought a toxic brand of anti-gay animus to Africa and Eastern Europe, the idea of civil society being widely tainted by faith-based calls to harm gays is hardly far-fetched.

All of which brings me back to the question... who, precisely, is being persecuted?

I'll tell you this: It sure as hell ain't white evangelicals. Gunmen aren't going into their churches and blasting away. When a gun-toting killer did murder multiple members of a congregation a year ago, it was a white triggerman blasting away in a black church, killing nine congregants and making racist remarks as he did so. The response by spooked lawmakers and gun enthusiasts always looking for a fresh excuse to open carry? In at least one state -- Texas, naturally -- churchgoers are now free to tote their weapons to church. You know, just in case.

But it seems to me that we - by which I mean gays, but in a broader sense non-evanglicals - have more to fear from white evangelicals than they have to fear from us. When's the last time straight white evangelicals had their marriage rights put up to a popular vote? For more than a decade, anti-gay zealots turned the individual and family rights of gays and lesbians into get-out-the-vote issues at ballot boxes across the nation. It was a form of legislative violence that had more to do with America's free-floating rape culture than "protecting marriage."

Even today, the Catholic church and its adjutants feel entirely justified in firing gay employees who dare to exercise their legal right to marry. (Hence the catch phrase "Married in the morning, fired in the afternoon.") The issue of marriage and the future makeup of the Supreme Court has supplanted, to a great degree, interest in competence or statesmanship in the current elections; even House Speaker Paul Ryan, who initially (and to his credit) seemed reluctant to vote for Donald Trump, eventually threw in with the Republican presumptive nominee after The Donald reassured Ryan that he'd push the GOP's agenda, a party platform that still includes rabidly anti-gay and anti-woman language. (The GOP has also effectively demonstrated its lingering racist tendencies, given that Ryan's endorsement of Trump came in the same breath as an acknowledgement that Trump's comments about a federal judge of Mexican heritage were racially offensive; A New York Daily News headline summarized Ryan's paradoxical conduct with the headline, "I'm with Racist.")

The fact that gays are literally in the crosshairs of anti-gay religious zealots of any and all faiths (and street-level gay bashers and mass murderers of no faith) is just the latest iteration of a long, long succession of minorities that masterful manipulators have tagged for intimidation, harassment, and murder by their followers. Native Americans and African-Americans used to bear the brunt of our great nation's faith-based bigotry and violence. At various times, immigrants, refugees, and Jews have also been targets. Women, too, have suffered under a presumption that White Christian males of the heterosexual variety are the natural stewards of all other creatures on the planet, including their fellow human beings. (But then again, in too many instances it's been hard to get these would-be masters of life on Earth even to look at their victims as human beings.)

So tell me again... who's being persecuted, and who is doing the persecuting?

More than any other singe event, the Supreme Court ruling of one year ago that granted marriage equality to same-sex families in all fifty states seems to have tipped the religious right into outright delusion. Suddenly, public officials feel that they are being "persecuted" when they are expected to do their jobs - or step out of the way if they need to, so that other, less judgmental people can do those jobs instead. Craven lawmakers hasten to follow anti-gay religious bigots into the thicket of anti-GLBT legislation, to their cost and that of entire state economies. And families that worked for, and now enjoy, first-class legal status as married Americans are endlessly excoriated - all because there are people of faith who assume they have some sort of divine right to impose their so-called "values" and, more importantly, their political will on everyone else.

What bull.

Christians in the United States are not being "persecuted." They have lost influence and credibility - ironically, in no small measure because of their own vicious, vitriolic, insanely aggressive attempts to dehumanize and demonize gay families. To put it bluntly, anti-gay Christians acted like complete assholes for years and years, and everyone saw them doing it. The Bible tells us, "By their works shall ye know them," and that's pretty much how it went down.

The AP article about white evangelicals feeling sorry for themselves makes abundantly clear what their real issue is. The article notes how, until recent years, evangelical Christians were a potent political and demographic force. Now? Well, now, they are much less so. If it feels like the End Times to them, that's because their status as cultural dominators is coming to a close.

The true cost of faith-based hate goes far beyond questions of status, and far beyond worries of who may marry whom. Truly good and decent people are now tarnished with the broad brush anti-gay Christians wielded so long against GLBTs - a broad brush of bigotry that has spattered plenty of muck back onto those who wielded it with such reckless energy. Younger Americans of all stripes - including younger evangelicals - have stepped away from the politics of homophobic bias, appalled.

As well they should: The lies the anti-gay Christian right told about us for so long - sexually feverish, downright fetishistic, and dripping with Freudian pathology - are now being heard for what they always were: Overheated, delirious outcries from gay-fixated monomaniacs, people who for decades were impossible to reason with because every time a gay person said the word "love," the Christian right screamed bloody murder about sex - sex with animals, sex with children, sex with corpses and Mazaratis and anything other than a loving and committed life partner.

After hearing verse after verse of this lunatic litany of sexual obsession, all any normal person - a person for whom sex is an important part of life, but far from the entirety of life - well, all a normal person, gay or straight, can say is, "Really? I mean, really?"

Really. Our lives... no, excuse me, our sex lives... are of enormous concern to anti-gay Christians because everyone's sex lives, they seem to feel, are available for their inspection and approval. Regrettably, they don't have the attention span to grasp that marriage is about more than sex; nor do they seem capable of lifting their eyes from the zippers of gay folks and looking them in the eye in order to have an honest conversation about things like family and law and faith.

Back to Clendenen, the pastor from last week's the AP story. What scintillating gem did he have to offer after everything else he had to say? He held up marriages like mine - a marriage that's now been legal for twelve years, a marriage that symbolizes 31 years of commitment and devotion - as being the problem.

If marriages like mine are a problem for Christians, then its a "problem" that speaks to deeper, more disturbing issues they seem unprepared and unable to deal with it in a rational, constructive way. Quite the contrary: The way anti-gay Christians have attacked us, wasted our time, wasted our money, endangered our children, defamed us, attempted to humiliate and denigrate us - all of that is, in sum, the way in which they have chosen to make their "problem" with our lives into a problem that afflicts us on deeply personal levels, in places and in ways that are inappropriate and unwelcome - intrusions that go on and on even as we push back and firmly insist, "No. Don't touch me there."

The good pastor failed, absolutely and categorically, to understand that he, and others who somehow think they should have the right to attack and destroy our families, are the ones who have created the problems we face around this issue. Gay families simply want to be left alone to get back to work, to their lives, to the business of - well, being a family. But to the anti-gay faithful, a kiss is a call to arms, and a commitment between two men or women becomes distorted into a general threat to the commitments of all mixed-gender couples.

Clendenen again, in last week's AP story:

"It [marriage equality] has become the keystone issue," he said, sitting in his office, where photos of his father and grandfather, both preachers, are on display. "I never thought we'd be in the place we are today. I never thought that the values I've held my whole life would bring us to a point where we were alienated or suppressed."

Uh huh. His values are being suppressed. State legislatures are passing laws that protect gay youth from being tortured for profit - and somehow his deeply held convictions are being "alienated." Corporations are now standing up for the rights of their LGBT employees - and Christians who choose to shutter their shops rather than bake a cake for same-sex wedding are being "persecuted." Gays at a clubs are being mowed down wholesale by gunman enraged at a simple kiss between two men, and somehow it's the poor Christians who only try to hurt us for our own good that we should be weeping for.

What a picture one comes away with: Sex-addled, gun-toting killers who stand in rivers of literal and metaphorical blood they have shed, whether they did it directly or indirectly. Tormenters who pursued, attacked, denounced, and destroyed us for decades -- no, actually centuries -- no, actually millennia -- who now have the moral obliviousness to howl that they are the ones being "persecuted."

Yeah, I don't think so.