Rick Warren Anally Rapes His Own Children*

(Title explained at the end of the post.)

Another day, another ridiculous comment on my column from last week...

so is obama [sic] an asshole because he agrees with Rick Warren that marriage should be between a man and a woman?

I'll say that Rick Warren is at least as tolerant as the author of this article, who apparently resorts to vitriolic name calling because he disagrees with Warren.

No, Obama is just a moral coward/typical politician who is willing to triangulate on foundational civil rights issues.

And the idea that Warren is at least as tolerant as I am because I am willing to fight back against Warren's smears doesn't even come close to passing the laugh test.

Seriously, did this commenter even read my column? Or, if he did, did he have the comprehension skills required to understand it? The answer to one or both of these questions is obviously "no."

But allow me an attempt to understand the reasoning at play here, which goes something like this...

The California Supreme Court ruled that the state's legislative prohibition on gay marriage violated its constitution's equal protection guarantees. Warren and his allies flipped out over this and waged a vicious smear campaign in which they compared gays to people who rape children or animals and did their best to convince the average Californian that his or her children were going to be shown instructional videos on the subject of anal sex in health class if they didn't vote to end marriage equality. This scare campaign was effective enough to get about 52 percent of California voters scared enough to vote to take marriage rights away from the gay and lesbian citizens of that state. And, not satisfied with the harm to people's lives they'd already caused, these same fundamentalist bullies are now dedicating their resources to nullifying the marriages of the roughly 18,000 same-sex couples who wed while they were legally able to do so. As a result of all of this, I have gotten extremely angry and lashed out in the strongest terms I could against these travesties of justice. And somehow me calling Warren a few unkind names make me (at least!) as guilty of intolerance as Warren himself.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!

I'm sorry, but Warren used his position of religious authority to back a smear campaign that equated all gay Americans with child rapists and people who fuck barnyard animals and pass a ballot initiative that will likely result in the destruction of 18,000 loving couples' marriages. This affects me because it fuels ignorant people's distorted views of what it means for me to be a gay man--and because I no longer have the right to get married if I happen to wind up living in California.

And me getting mad about these outrages and calling Warren an idiotic asshole and a corpulent toad is somehow equivalent to the underlying outrages themselves? Seriously? Only through some truly hollow and twisted moral calculus could anyone come to such a preposterous conclusion.

Warren says I'm the moral equivalent of a pedophile and it's rude of me to retort that he's an idiot?

Give me a fucking break.

Telling me that I should be nice to Warren regardless of the legal and social consequences of his political crusade against my right to be treated equally in this country is pretty damned insulting. It's the equivalent of telling Rosa Parks that she should just go quietly to the back of the bus. Maybe, just maybe, if she's nice and polite enough to the good white folk, maybe they'll eventually reconsider and let her sit where she wants. Maybe if she just addresses all white people politely enough and says "yes, sir, master" just politely enough, then maybe they'll decide to let her vote with being intimidated. And rather than going to the U.S. Supreme Court and demanding the right to marry, maybe interracial couples could have achieved the same result by engaging in constructive, friendly conversation with the racist bastards who saw their unions as impure.

As I made clear in my column, Warren has the right to call me names all he wants. I'll happily return the favor. What he doesn't have the right to do is deny me marriage equality. Civil marriage rights are not supposed to be subject to the veto of sectarian ideologues. I demand equality and I demand it now. Asserting that I'm wrong to do so puts a person solidly in the company of bigots throughout history. It's no more defensible than was favoring the maintenance of racial segregation. That is the moral nature of Rick Warren, corpulent poisonous toad that he is.

* And, no, I don't think Warren actually anally rapes his own children. But that's the kind of name calling he engages in when he speaks out against gay rights. Note how tame most of my invectives are by comparison. Furthermore, to actually be as bad as Warren I'd have to not only assert that he anally rapes his own children, but also take away his marriage. So, please, stop claiming that I'm as intolerant as he is.