Tony Perkins, president of the anti-LGBTQ hate group Family Research Council and recent appointee to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, compared tolerating transgender people to allowing someone to jump off a building to their death.
On yesterday’s edition of “Washington Watch,” Perkins fielded a call from a listener who compared identifying as a transgender person to identifying as a cat. Perkins thanked the caller for making that point before offering his own analogy aimed at delegitimizing transgender people, similar to the way anti-equality conservatives in the 2000s equated same-sex marriage with bestiality.
“If you are a male—genetically you are a male, biologically you’re a male—and you say, ‘Well, I’m not a male. I’m a female.’ I mean, what’s to keep you from saying you’re an animal?” Perkins said.
Perkins then expanded his point with a bizarre analogy in which he gave listeners a hypothetical scenario, asking if they believed they would have a moral responsibility to keep a man who thinks he’s a bird from jumping off a building and killing himself.
“Think about this for a minute. Someone says, ‘Well look, I’m a bird-man, alright? I’m a bird-man and I’m going to jump off this building and fly.’ Do you have a responsibility to stop that person from jumping off that building? I mean, you know that they don’t have feathers and they can’t fly, but you would hurt their feelings if you said, ‘No wait, Fred, you’re not a bird-man. You’re a man but you’re not a bird and you can’t fly.’ But out of respect for not hurting his feelings, you go ahead and let him jump, and that was the end of Fred,” he said.
He concluded, “That’s again the lunacy, because the reality is when we allow kids, people, to identify with something other than reality, it is ultimately hurting themselves.”
