By Bob Cesca:

Earlier this month, I wrote an article in which I suggested that liberals stop hectoring people of faith and simply focus on religious groups and leaders who attempt to undermine or replace secular law with biblical dogma. But wow, they really, really make it difficult sometimes. Especially when they get it as horribly wrong as Pastor Rick Warren did the other night.

You might recall how Warren was invited by the president to deliver the invocation at the 2009 inaugural. As I’ve mentioned several times over the past couple of years in response to various Greenwald acolytes on the left, this was first of many actions by the president that I vocally opposed. Of course, as you know, if you subsequently say anything affirmative about the president, you’re categorically labeled an Obamabot.

Anyway, Warren, who’s allegedly one of the reasonable, sane preachers, has a long history of saying offensive things about the LGBT community. Here’s what he said to CNN’s Piers Morgan about homosexuality:

Here’s what we know about life. I have all kinds of natural feelings in my life and it doesn’t necessarily mean that I should act on every feeling. Sometimes I get angry and I feel like punching a guy in the nose. It doesn’t mean I act on it. Sometimes I feel attracted to women who are not my wife. I don’t act on it. Just because I have a feeling doesn’t make it right. Not everything natural is good for me. Arsenic is natural.

Uh-huh. Interesting logic there. Warren thinks there’s a victim of personal injury inherent in what’s evidently poisonous homosexual attraction, just as there’s personal injury when you punch a guy or cheat on your wife or ingest arsenic. Homosexuality, in Warren’s view, isn’t just evil (without any explanation as to precisely why it’s evil), but it’s also physically dangerous to anyone who’s confronted by the outward pursuit of homosexuality, not unlike the potential victims of Warren’s apparent Hulk-like rage.

So who are the victims of homosexuality?

We don’t know. He didn’t say, mainly because he can’t say. We’re just expected to believe there’s violence and a victim in the equation. According to Warren and others, pursuing same-sex attraction is another form of acting upon a hateful or deceptive impulse.

Now, that said, too many mouth-breathing dingus self-identified straight men believe that by witnessing two gay people holding hands, kissing or having sex, they themselves will perhaps turn gay — or if they’re tolerant of homosexuality, their idiot friends might think they’re gay, too. They usually make a big production out of saying how disgusting it is. So in that respect, some men think they’re victims of homosexuality, but unless they’re secretly gay themselves — and more than of few of them probably are — being in the presence of gay people won’t make them turn gay any more than being in the presence of women will make them grow breasts and a vagina.

No one, and especially Warren can adequately explain why being gay is wrong or so frightening. “The Bible says so,” simply doesn’t suffice and is easily the most ridiculous response anyone could give, mainly because there’s no real explanation in the Bible either. From Leviticus to Romans, the Bible says it’s wrong without any justification for why it’s wrong beyond the inexplicable coupling of homosexuality with theft and murder. But again, if the Bible believes homosexuality is a criminally immoral act, where’s the victim? God? Why? How? No one can answer this question even though it’s the centerpiece of homophobic religious dogma.

The sad and shameful reality of humanity is that all people are prone to violence, selfishness and impulsivity, regardless of sexuality, race or background. If there’s anyone who’s on the receiving end of our most disgusting and hateful impulses, it’s homosexuals themselves who are too often bullied, beaten and sometimes killed because of who they are — a consequence of the demonization proffered by ignorant homophobes like Rick Warren who don’t seem to understand that homosexuality is merely a loving, consenting relationship between two adults — not unlike Warren’s relationship with his wife.

In the absence of a rational, factual explanation, we can only conclude that these views are nothing less than bigotry. As such, I certainly hope “Pastor Rick” isn’t invited back to the president’s second inaugural.

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Andrew Sullivan’s post about ‘How to Survive a Plague’, a new film on the gay civil rights movement and AIDS epidemic is an absolute must read. Key quote:

If you want to understand the gay civil rights movement in the last twenty years, you need to see this film. None of it would have happened as it did, if we had not been radicalized by mass death, stripped of fear by imminent death, and determined to bring meaning to the corpses of our loved ones by fighting for the basic rights every heterosexual has taken for granted since birth. No spouse was ever going to be turned away from his husband’s deathbed again, as far as I was concerned. Never. Again. For me, marriage equality is not an abstract concept. It has always been my attempt to make my friends’ deaths mean something more than tragedy. And it is non-negotiable.

Sullivan’s personal account of living through what he describes as a ‘mass sickness and death that killed five times as many young Americans as the Vietnam War in roughly the same period of time’ is a harrowing read in itself:

People forget that HIV decimated the immune system – but people actually died from the opportunistic infections. These “OI”s were something out of Dante’s Hell. So many drowned to death from pneumocystis. Or they would develop hideous KS lesions, or extremely painful neuropathy (my “buddy” screamed once when I brushed a bedsheet against the tip of his toes), or CMV where a friend of mine had to inject himself in the eyeball to prevent going blind, or toxoplasmosis, a brain degenerative disease where people wake up one day to find they can’t tie their shoe-laces, and their memories are falling apart. Within the gay community, 300,000 deaths amounted to a plague of medieval dimensions. Once you knew your T-cells were below a certain level, it was like being in a dark forest where, at any moment, some hideous viral or bacterial creature could emerge and kill you. And for fifteen years there was nothing to take that worked, just the agonizing helplessness of waiting to die, and watching others get assaulted by one terrifying disease after another.

That type of fear is unimaginable to most people – and to live with it for years defies the boundaries of human tolerance. It’s a topic I don’t know a huge deal about, but Sullivan’s post alone has given me even more respect for the gay community that not only fought to be treated as human beings, but suffered horrors akin to war – and for far, far longer.

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