Glenn Beck apparently lives in complete isolation from the world around him because there is no other way to explain how he can go about decrying the anti-gay fascism that is rising in Russia on his radio broadcast yesterday while simultaneously declaring that “I don’t know anybody who is anti-gay, at least not any of my friends.”
We have no idea what Beck’s definition of “anti-gay” must be if it doesn’t apply to the people that he surrounds himself with since, as we pointed out last week, his good friend Ken Hutcherson was probably best known for being a vehemently anti-gay activist who once called for a ban the promotion of homosexuality.
And let’s not forget that Rabbi Daniel Lapin, whom has appeared on Beck’s show numerous times, has said that “barbarism has sex in the canal through which dead, useless, waste material is excreted” and declared that people with AIDS should have been rounded-up and quarantined during the early days of the AIDS crisis.
And what about Beck’s good friend David Barton, who has said that gay sex should be regulated by the government and asserted that it is a sign that a nation is going through a spiritual revival when it stops tolerating homosexuality. Barton has predicted that gay marriage will lead to people marrying dogs and horses and said that it doesn’t matter what the Supreme Court rules, homosexuality ought to always remain illegal. Repeatedly declaring that homosexuality is “an aberration” that “violates the laws of nature,” Barton has also proclaimed it to be “reprehensible” and “disgusting” and stated that science will never find a cure for AIDS because the disease is God’s punishment for those who engage in “shameful sexual acts.”
Barton also has close ties to rabidly anti-gay activist Scott Lively and even spoke at a fundraiser for Lively’s group. Lively, of course, has been instrumental in spreading the Religious Right’s anti-gay animus all over the world and took partial credit for the crackdown in Russia, declaring it to be “one of the proudest achievements of my career.”
In fact, just about the entire Religious Right movement in America has praised Russia’s anti-gay laws, admitting that the laws passed in Russia are exactly the sort of “public policy that we’ve been advocating.”
Beck brings anti-gay activists on to his radio and television programs with shocking regularity and is close friends with several people who perfectly represent exactly what it means to be “anti-gay.”
But Beck declares that he doesn’t even know people who are anti-gay, which raises the question of just what his definition of the term could entail if none of his good friends meet it.
