Did Matthew Shepard Suffer Enough?

Huckabee Doesn't Seem To Think So

According to Mike Huckabee, gays have just not suffered enough to have their rights linked to "civil rights." On The View, Huckabee went on and on about his pride in America in electing Barack Obama, but when Joy Behar asked him about gay rights, he immediately went into phobic mode: gay rights are "different rights." He then went on to suggest that the turmoil of the African American Civil Rights movement, was too staggering to be compared to gay rights.

Evidently, this is the new tack by Christofascists: "gays haven't suffered enough."


(From Think Progress, Nov. 19)

Tara Wall, deputy editorial page editor at the Washington Times, wrote today that “[t]here is no comparison” between blacks’ struggle and gay people’s struggle because “[b]lacks were stoned, hung, and dragged for their constitutional right to ’sit at the table.’ Whites — gay or not — already had a seat at that table.”

(TP) To suggest that a civil rights movement must meet some sort of violence threshold is an incredibly dangerous argument — not to mention blind to the serious violence gay people have already suffered. 16.6 percent of all hate crimes reported by the FBI in 2007 “resulted from sexual-orientation bias,” and the number of hate crimes directed against gays and lesbians increased six percent from 2006. More striking, a 2007 study by the University of California, Davis, found that “[n]early four in 10 gay men and about one in eight lesbians and bisexuals in the United States have been the target of violence or a property crime because of their sexual orientation.”

Think Progress said it more stridently and more succinctly than I ever could. Thanks. Let's see now: gays absolutely MUST experience some form of slavery, undergo Jim Crow-like laws, and be killed on more massive a scale than they have been in the past. How bloodthirsty! How Southern Baptist! How Christofascist to laud the election of someone in a minority then turn around and say that another minority has a "different" set of rights. Too bad. Sometimes Mike Huckabee seems almost genuine...and human. But Southern Baptists can be very, very hypocritical.

You almost have to ask: are they born that way, or do they choose to be hypocrites?

Just a thought.


Before you view Huckabee's statement, look at these statistics:

Isn't 97.2% ENOUGH?