A man who once threatened the life of the BIAW’s Tom McCabe, can’t be all bad… so I’ve tried to keep some perspective on the sad (yet comic) story of Spokane’s gay-bashing/gay-banging soon-to-be-former mayor, Jim West. The charges of child molestation, while heinous, will never be proven short of a personal confession, and apart from the disturbing image of the mayor, pants down, jacking-off at his City Hall computer, his admission of legal, consensual sex with other men (however young) is scandalous mostly in its stunning hypocrisy.
But when it comes to right-wing moralists, West is far from the most stunning hypocrite. For example, there is militant, anti-abortion activist Neal Horsley.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, Horsley leads the Creator’s Rights Party, whose website gathers personal information on abortion providers — pictures, addresses, license-plate and social security numbers, etc — essentially creating a target list for assassination. It also includes an article by Horsley entitled “Arresting Homosexuals (for their own good)“, which cites the Matthew Shepard murder as evidence that gays should be locked up because they inspire revulsion in the general populace.
And so it was with some disbelief that I read on News Hounds the bizarre transcript of a recent interview Horsley gave Fox radio-host Alan Colmes. Colmes asked about an Esquire Magazine interview, in which Horsley reportedly admitted to engaging in homosexual sex… and even bestiality.
NH: “Hey, Alan, if you want to accuse me of having sex when I was a fool, I did everything that crossed my mind that looked like I…”
AC: “You had sex with animals?”
NH: “Absolutely. I was a fool. When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule.”
AC: “I’m not so sure that that is so.”
NH: “You didn’t grow up on a farm in Georgia, did you?”
AC: “Are you suggesting that everybody who grows up on a farm in Georgia has a mule as a girlfriend?”
NH: It has historically been the case. You people are so far removed from the reality… Welcome to domestic life on the farm…”
Um… I don’t want to come off as some out-of-touch, liberal, elitist city-slicker… but if this sort of thing is typical of rural, “red state” America… I don’t think I want to be in touch.
You can’t make this kind of stuff up! But just in case you think I did, and that this is some sort of vicious fraud perpetrated by liberal blogs, here’s a link to a source I’m sure you can trust, the Alan Colmes Show page on FoxNews.com, where you can actually listen to an excerpt for yourself. (And while you’re at it, listen to Randi Rhodes’ take on the story, and her amusing use of sound effects.)
Horsley has described gays as “faggots who will burn in Hell”, and who are part of “Satan’s plan”… and this from a man who believes that fucking farm animals is all a part of growing up in rural America. As he so eloquently explained to Colmes:
“You experiment with anything that moves when you are growing up sexually. […] If it’s warm and it’s damp and it vibrates you might in fact have sex with it.”
Yeah sure… if you’re a fucking pervert!
Now I’m not suggesting that all right-wing, gay-bashing evangelical extremists are porking pigs — or even just having your average, run-of-the-mill, boring, missionary-style gay sex — but apparently, some are. So when I hear the likes of U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum or Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, talking about the slippery slope from gay marriage to perversions like bestiality, I just think it’s worth pointing out that they’re figuratively and literally, closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.
And if I were the horse, I’d bolt too.
(A big thanks to HA reader DanW for tipping me off to this important news story.)