Oh, yes, those incredibly savvy folks south of the Mason-Dixon line are at it again! Right now, I’m speaking about North Carolina. I’m going to put a quick disclaimer in here because I have at least one friend who lives there and I know this does not apply to her. (Sorry, Lisa.) But she’s originally from Massachusetts anyway. I lived in North Carolina for about three months when I was young and let me tell you, I could not wait to get back home. I knew something wasn’t quite right. Recent events have proved this to be true.
First, North Carolina passed Amendment 1 banning same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriage was already illegal in North Carolina prior to adding a Constitutional amendment. Yet so intent are some people at sealing the door on same-sex marriage that Amendment 1 also voids other types of domestic unions, essentially jeopardizing protections for unmarried heterosexual couples as well. Now that Barack Obama has come out in favor of same-sex marriage, the folks in North Carolina have gone stark raving mad and they have a brandy new Champion of the Lunatic Fringe.
The solution to the gay scourge
In the video below is 71-year-old Pastor Charles L. Worley of the Providence Road Baptist Church. He’s ‘agin’ same-sex marriage. Just like the Bible’s ‘agin’ it. And he has the ultimate solution:
Pastor Worley’s solution is indeed horrifying. There’s no question about it. It’s not based on teachings from any God I know. (In fact, I think a guy named Hitler had a similar plan.) But it would be so much more horrifying if he wasn’t so damned stupid. Pastor Worley is going to fence all the lesbians in. Then, do the same for the queers and homosexuals. (These would be the males, of course.) But according to this genius, keeping us apart will ensure that we’ll die out because the ‘queers and homosexuals’ cannot reproduce. Here’s where the big “I” for “idiot” began to light up on Pastor Moron’s forehead. What is this nitwit thinking?
Now, I don’t mean to burst his bubble or to tax the vacuum area between his ears, but I am incredibly gay…gay from the womb as they say. My parents were heterosexual. We’re gonna’ keep comin’, Pastor Worley. In fact, I have a ton of gay friends and we’re all from heterosexual parents. And what happens when other gay people move to North Carolina (although I cannot imagine why they would, frankly)? I’m assuming the Pastor is going to assemble an army of gay-detecting bigots to continuously round us up and either starve or electrocute us.
What this supposed man of God has in his head is something so heinous that it is almost hard to fathom. While there are times that I honestly feel giving people this evil any attention at all gives them too much credence, I find him frightening. And I find the morons in his church yelling “Amen” in the background equally scary. Pastor Worley is being asked to step down from his position at Providence Road Baptist Church.
There’s a petition on change.org asking Pastor Worley to step down (he won’t; too ignorant). Sign it and pass it along to as many people as you can.
Pastor Worley has set off a firestorm of outrage over his Mother’s Day remarks. Catawba Valley Citizens Against Hate is calling for a peaceful protest outside the church on Sunday. Laura Tipton, the protest’s organizer, told msnbc.com:
“I think the message needs to get out, especially because this is a North Carolina church and North Carolina has gotten a very bad rap. I think it’s important that people know that not all of us feel this way, that there is support for the LGBT community in this state.”
In the meantime, here’s a blast from the past from the KKK
Apparently, there’s plenty of stupidity and ignorance to go around in North Carolina. Yearning for the good old days, the Ku Klux Klan has invited the residents of Reidsville to a “white people only” cross burning on May 26. Talk about good old fashioned family fun!
The KKK even passed out fliers rolled up like newspapers and tied with yellow rubber bands. How quaint. As reported in the Winston-Salem Journal, the invitation reads
“Join us, the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, for a rally and cross lighting, Saturday, May 26, Harmony, North Carolina. Free Admition (sic)-White People Only. No alcohol, drugs, fighting, glass bottles or weapons. Free on site camping-all major motels in area. Souvenirs. Vendors. Food and beverages for Sale. Cross lighting at dusk-a white unity event. Live country band. Security provided by LWK.”
I’ll tell you. It doesn’t get any better than this, does it? Talk about your fun-filled vacation spots.
Groups like the resurgent KKK and those who speak hate and extermination in the name of God are on the rise. They are not going away. Desperate to stave off equality and determined to deter the tolerance train, they are coming out of the woodwork. They will continue to grow exponentially unless people fight back and tell them there’s absolutely no room for them on this planet.
Categories: Bigotry, Hate Crime, Hate Groups, Homophobia, LGBT Civil Rights, Religious Right, Right-Wing Ideology, White Supremacist
Revolutionary Radar 
By the time I got around to looking up the word “malignant” via Google, your RR post was already there. You’re fast, I swear. Anyway, “malignant” comes from the Latin, meaning “badly born”. I’m not sure this insidious behavior can be attributed to “birth” (like they try to do to homosexuality): I think it must be grown and cultivated through misinformation and fear, and done in a carefully maintained and controlled (and then preserved), in a very large environmental petri dish of mental degredation called “the south”. Calling it “cancerous” might be better, since the dictionary says that cancers are caused 85% from the environment and 15% (or so) from genetics. Lord knows, the environment in them parts ain’t healthy. I have friends there,also and none of them expect me to visit or, if I do, to stay very long. But enough with the semantics and the apologies.
This is another self-righteous, self-aggrandizing old white man who should be put out to pasture where no one can hear him. He is an anti-intelligence aberration of humanity, who has obviously been hiding from reality in his gross misinterpretations of the very “scriptures” he is supposed to understand and represent. This man is the personification of thinking and religion both run amock. (the KK boys are a seperate study in cerebral malfuntion, also a cancer, I suspect).
I go back to my continual plea to stop giving hateful lunatics like this free publicicty. The less we hear from them, the better are our chances to break the cycle of ignorance. The not-very-good reverend deserves a fout letter word, and “vile” comes to mind. Also “reprehensible”, but I have trouble spelling that.
Dear Ivan, as a lesbian, I find people like this hard to ignore. The fact is that people have gone off the edge over Barack Obama’s sudden “evolution” on same-sex marriage. I am always torn between giving them any press at all and exposing them for what they are. There are a LOT of these people out there. I’m not sure I can ignore them because the utter hateful bullshit they spread tends to stick in small minds. There are just enough fuckwits in that video yelling “Amen” to piss me off. It’s hard to ignore the suggestion of a concentration camp coming from a man of the cloth.
The real issue here is that there is way too fucking much religion in this country. Way too much. It is the root of all evil, I’m convinced. While the less “developed” nations are moving away from this shit, we are rushing headlong into the fantasy that this is a Christian nation. And there are just enough seriously stupid people here to believe it. Religion is for people who have no individual thought process, and there are a lot of those types here these days. Know what I’m saying?
Thanks, as always, for the response.
Well said. I’m proud of you, Deb.
Deb,
I’m leaving you more of a blog than a reply, but this is not a simple issue. What’s malignant in NC is the brainwashing that brought Jim Crow to the South – and the fact that it’s never been openly exposed and properly denounced – at least that’s how I see it.
I agree with you. we should not ignore this. It must be exposed.
As a matter of fact I believe it is our lack of condemnation and exposure of those who perpetrated the atrocities of white supremacy campaigns of 1898 and 1900 (that I believe are largely at the root of the Worley/KKK mentality) that help support this mentality. I’m speaking of Josephus Daniels, Furnifold Simmons and Charles B Aycock, who, instead of being openly condemned by the world for their atrocities, went on to enjoy lucrative careers after their propaganda campaign brought Jim Crow to NC and led to an increase in lynchings and other violent and repressive acts against those with any noticeable African ancestry (our country’s holocaust).
Because Hitler was put to enormous shame after his more obvious and more acute atrocities were revealed to the world, you don’t see any streets in Germany called “Hilter” or statues of Hitler or Goebbels. But in NC, there’s an Aycock street in every town I’ve lived in – one just two streets south of me. Aycock is the name of the auditorium at my college, and there’s a statue honoring Daniels at the state capital – near the Capitol lawn. Daniels went on to be Wilson’s Sec of the Navy, Ambassador to Mexico, and he was even sent to Haiti to try to force Jim Crow on that country.
NC has just recently gotten around to acknowledging the Wilmington massacre that Daniels’ propaganda created, but it wasn’t talked about much outside of Raleigh or Wilmington.
I grew up in Greensboro, which interestingly – despite being the site of the infamous Klan massacre (1979) – had one of the few newspapers in the South that did not bow to Daniels’ demands. (Daniels would destroy any politician who tried to be lenient with blacks or even college professors who pointed to black intelligence – he controlled most of the state’s press and its politicians.). G’boro became one of the larger cities and has a large population originating from outside the state as does Raleigh, however there are still a lot of small towns that hold on to the mindset that began with that 1898 propaganda campaign. Brainwashing is a very powerful tool – many people need to be “deprogrammed” – but that’s not really in the interest of the current system either.
Sadly they don’t realize that the campaign aims were almost as much for the detriment of the majority of whites as they were for blacks – almost. It’s as simple as this – slave labor was still needed to pick cotton, and white almost slave labor was needed in the mills. Cotton was the king of the US and had been since the 1800s.
The aim of the political campaign of 1898 was to break up a bond that had developed between the two communities – black and white (I use the terms, knowing that race, itself, is a myth) in an attempt to block growing takeover of land rights and other oppressive actions meant to benefit only the wealthy majority – meant to move a lot of whites off their lands and into the mills for one. And at first this bond (a Populist Party takeover) was successful in breaking up elitist control of the state and in initiating some very progressive reforms that benefited the majority.
So, elitists knew they’d have to find something stronger than physical force and threats of violence to break up this new bond – the old tactics would not work this time because the bond -all the poor working together for the good of all — itself was working so well
So they opted for the psychological approach. They targeted the most base of basic human emotions – sex and fear – exploiting these using what I see as very sophisticated tactics for their time, and historians say the brainwashing was effective beyond their wildest dreams. Daniels, with vicious editorials (reinforced by crude, degrading and sexually suggestive cartoons – for the illiterate), daily attacked people of color in every way imaginable, turning them into beasts and threats in the eyes of whites, and shaming whites who had joined them, politically, in the Populist movement -warning that the consequences would be social equality accompanied by the rape of their white women ( of course totally ignoring the reality that white men had been raping black women for centuries in America).
That’s why politicians today, particularly Republicans (who replaced the Dixiecrats – Old Democratic Party in the South) continue to focus on sex and fear to win votes. Because non-thinking people buy it.
Not always, but usually the least educated are the ones targeted because they are the most receptive to these tactics, as they were back in 1898.
Those who never moved from their rural villages and small towns are often those who retain the old prejudiced views, passed from one generation to the next, not realizing that like those they condemn, they too are being exploited right along with them — to keep them distracted from the fact that their country is robbing them blind. And their blindness is allowing the elites to continue their economic oppression — of all of us! the politicians couldn’t care less about sexual orientation, abortion or race, except for how their exploitation benefits those who keep them in office.
I am 8th generation North Carolinian – and believe me, not all of us agree with the Worleys and the Klan – we just don’t garner the attention they do. Hopefully they are now the minority. But sadly, this horrible economy and the Supreme Court decision making it easier for money to buy elections, may be creating more bigots as it becomes more and more impossible for the average citizen to get a college education — or even travel away from their backward backgrounds. (add to that the growing technology of mind control (sometimes called advertising – attack ads etc) – touched on in the film – the Greatest Story Ever Sold).
Below are my petitions on this. DEMOCRACY BETRAYED is the best book I’ve read on this topic, and my book focuses on this issue in one chapter. I’d like to write one contrasting Hilter’s atrocties with those in the US – slavery -Jim Crow – Lynchings – Eugenics.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/923/983/058/ban-all-cross-burnings-in-nc/
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/543/223/001/fire-nc-pastor-for-lgbt-hate-language/