THERE USED TO BE a time when sane politicians ran away from endorsements from the insane. They would avoid embarrassing situations where they were photographed with loose cannons or people with loose morals. In today’s Republican Party the script has been flipped. The candidates now line up to fete the outrageous and the perpetually outraged. They have cemented their ties to the demented, kowtowing to kooks, crackpots, and crazies. A long line of losers (Kim Davis), lowlifes (Josh Duggar), and loons (The Duck Dynasty cast and Ted Nugent) are now Republican Royalty.
Just such an event took place last November when three Republican presidential candidates—Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and (former candidate) Bobby Jindal—attended an event featuring Kevin Swanson, an evangelical preacher who has a rabid obsession with homosexuals and indeed advocates their execution. Instead of running away, they eagerly joined Swanson in Iowa at his National Religious Liberties Conference, a forum to spin gay bashing into a defense of religious freedom.
During his sermon, Swanson reiterated his view that both the Old and New Testament require the death penalty for the crime of homosexuality, as well as his position that any Christian who attends a gay wedding can only do so in order to hold up a sign informing the couple that they ought to be murdered. He said that if he found out that one of his own sons were gay and invited him to his wedding, he would create a spectacle to express his disapproval.
“There are families, we’re talking Christian families, pastors’ families, elders’ families from good, godly churches,” Swanson said, as recorded on a video by Right Wing Watch, “whose sons are rebelling, hanging out with homosexuals and getting married and the parents are invited. What would you do if that was the case? Here is what I would do: sackcloth and ashes at the entrance to the church and I’d sit in cow manure and I’d spread it all over my body. That is what I would do and I’m not kidding, I’m not laughing. I’m grieving, I’m mourning, I’m pointing out the problem,” Swanson bellowed as he described people trying to “carve happy faces on the sores” of a society that is utterly “messed up.”
According to Right Wing Watch, a conference speaker “distributed literature at the event laying out how and why gay people should be put to death, discussing stoning and throwing people off cliffs as possible punishments.” Sounding more like ISIS than a messenger of Christ, Swanson has apparently been urged by some Christians to tamp it down. Swanson breezily dismissed these suggestions and went on a full-blown bigot binge. According to their warped logic, unless he and his followers can dehumanize LGBT people, they are the true “victims” being persecuted!
The mainstream media largely ignored this event, giving the three presidential candidates a tacit pass. The one exception was msnbc’s Rachel Maddow, who ran an excellent segment that highlighted the radicalism of Swanson and the reprobates who enable his evil obsessions. “It really was a ‘kill-the-gays’ call to arms,” Maddow said. “This was a conference about the necessity of the death penalty as a punishment for homosexuality. … A pretty major theme of the event was the practical challenges and the timing of how exactly and when exactly the United States of America should start rounding up gay people in this country in order to execute them.”
The presence of Cruz, Huckabee, and Jindal at this pastor’s events represent a shameful chapter in the Republican Party’s history and indicates how low that party will go to achieve power. It is astounding that the amoral, empty souls who filled the pews mistake this gutter fanaticism for a religious message.
Note: It’s worth watching Kevin Swanson in action if you can stomach it. The rant was posted on a number of websites, including those of Human Rights Watch and Rachel Maddow’s show on msnbc. It can be found on YouTube several times over.
Wayne Besen is the founder and director of Truth Wins Out, a watchdog on the regligious Right. A widely published author, he has appeared as a commentator on many news shows and has his own radio talk show on WCPT in Chicago.
