IN TWEET: A SERMON FROM THE SERVICE ATTENDED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA YESTERDAY FLIPS OUT RIGHT WINGERS AND REVEALS WHAT SCARES THEM MOST: THE TRUTH.
If you’re a hard-core Evangelical and/or adherent to the Tea Party version of conservatism, it’s a pretty scary world out there. Once you pop your head out from under the rock of Fox News or crawl beyond the shadow of Rush Limbaugh’s massive gut, it’s hard out there for a Right Wing pimp, yo! Here’s the wicked scary “evidence” giving Righties the heebie jeebies:
- There’s a scary black man in the White House. YOWZA!
- The scary black man in the White House also happens to be a card-carrying Muslim Socialist who was born in A-freak-a! OHMIGOSH!
- You’ve got those “wetbacks” massing on the border and climbing ladders to get into this country just so they can take our jobs. YIKES!
- The “filthy homosexuals” aren’t happy molesting children and boning sheep anymore, now they want to get married. GASP!
- The Second Commandment…I mean…Amendment is under attack and the black helicopters are a-comin’ to take away our beloved guns. EEEK!
- Women just won’t admit that they really do have magic anti-rape spermicide in them and, even if this mystical she juice fails to flow, the little rape baby is a gift from God they should want to carry to term. ZOINKS!
- Those Obamacare death panels are coming (really, they are, you betcha) and soon microchips will be implanted in each of us so we can be tracked like lab rats. AAAAAH!
I wish this alt-reality was some massive April Fools joke or one of those bizarro nightmares you have after eating a stuffed burrito well past midnight. Alas, that isn’t the case. As each of the hyperlinks embedded in the bullet points above illustrates (and I do encourage you to read the linked articles), Righties in this country are a minority of the electorate who remain in thrall to a bizarre fictional narrative that has made reality something they avoid while also convincing them that all this “progress” is just a phase.
In the “up is down” world of the Righties, all they have to do is close their eyes and click their heels three or four hundred times. If they just stick to their guns long enough (no pun intended), we’ll soon return to the “good old days” when women were submissive to their husbands, gay men were confirmed bachelors, lesbians were WACS, black folks loved to sing Negro spirituals at the back of the bus and the closest we’d ever have to get to anyone of Hispanic or Latino origin was that Ricardo guy on I LOVE LUCY.
As Mark Twain once said, “denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” True that! In fact, if you’re a Righty, denial has fast become the ocean surrounding the island that is your limited world view. They’ve pretty much adopted a siege mentality for the better part of the last five years and spent the bulk of their energy preaching to the choir. While Righties kept treading water, the rest of us kept moving forward. The Right Wing M.O. was akin that fingers in the ear, la la la la thing kids do when their parents say something they don’t like.
That was, until yesterday. That’s when Rev. Luis Leon dared call out Right Wing zealotry in his Easter sermon. An Easter sermon that also happened to be attended by President Obama and his family. Were the President not in the house, no one outside of Rev. Leon’s church would be talking about this sermon. The mere presence of Obama is all it took to trigger Super Storm Righty, a freak out of Biblical proportions.
In less than 24 hours, the sermon went from the hallowed halls of St. John’s to the bile spewing lips of just about every Right Wing talking head and pundit. Bubba Rush went ballistic. Fox News started another firestorm (with an assist from dingbat anchor Megyn Kelly, rubbing her only two sticks together). Conservative pundits were shocked, SHOCKED! They chewed the sermon up and spit it out as hate speech. Filth, I tell you. FILTH! Here’s the passage that caused the kerfuffle:
“It drives me crazy when the captains of the religious right are always calling us back…for blacks to be back in the back of the bus, for women to be back in the kitchen, for gays to be in the closet and for immigrants to be back on their side of the border.”
Quelle suprise! Those words were all it took for the Right to lose its collective shit. Even more telling, in less than 24 hours, the words of Rev. Louis Leon morphed into the “Obama Easter Sermon” across Right Wingdom. It was as if Obama gave the sermon himself or had a had in writing it. He didn't do either of those things but, truth be damned!
Suddenly Rev. Louis Leon wasn’t even himself anymore. Instead, the Righties re-christened him “Obama’s Easter Pastor” and went to town. Somehow, on the f-ed up FANTASY ISLAND these nuts call home, an Episcopal reverend calling out racism, sexism and homophobia was itself racist. Not, of course, because there's a shred of truth to the allegation. The sermon was racist solely because Obama was there to hear it. WTF?!?!
Back in the real world, during the past few weeks alone, high ranking Republicans and Evangelicals have been on a particularly disgusting verbal tirade. They think nothing of their own casual use of hate speech while in the same breath they have the nerve to bitch when someone calls them out on it. Time to Google hypocrisy (or click that link if you’re lazy).
We’ve seen Mexicans called “wetbacks" by Rep. Don Young (R-AK), who stubbornly refused to apologize until he was shamed into doing so. The LGBT community, a favorite whipping boy of Righties, has been lumped into the same company as the boy lovers of NAMBLA and those who like to lay with our four legged friends by Dr. Ben Carson. Not only did this jackass try to claim that he meant no offense (he did) and his comments were taken out of context (they weren’t), good old Megyn Kelly leapt to his defense. Yes, the same Megyn Kelly who spent the past 24 hours shoveling shit all over Rev. Leon.
Wait, there’s more! A Republican troll in Georgia claimed marriage equality would lead to tax fraud. Several states made it clear that when it comes to women’s reproductive rights, the Constitution matters little to them. In addition to the current Obama-centric shit storm, the “Obama is dumb and lazy” meme continued unabated as this article from Mother Jones astutely details.
Other than a few key Republicans correctly condemning the “wetback” fiasco (in part because focus groups told them it was a bad word), the bulk of these hateful lies met almost no resistance from Right Wing media pundits. The sound of silence was deafening and disgusting but not at all surprising. Personally, I think Rev. Leon was too kind. If I was giving that sermon, Megyn Kelly would have something genuinely juicy to chew on with her limited intellect.
Of course, this never was about truth or fairness or facts. Righties can dish out a ton of mean spirited hate but when someone rings their clue phone, they cannot take it. The truth hurts those who deny it most and Rev. Leon opened up a big, ugly Right Wing wound.
So, let’s bring out the salt and pour it in. No matter how much the Righties want to piss and moan about this sermon, they’re wrong. They remain firmly entrenched on the wrong side of history and their obsessive hatred of President Obama is fueled by one simple truth: he is the physical embodiment of everything they despise.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Righties, but YOU are now the minority. Here are the facts:
- Women are not going back to being second class citizens nor will they allow misguided men to decide what’s best for them and their families.
- Blacks are never going to return to the back of the bus or be denied their voting rights.
- Immigrants, specifically the brown-skinned ones you fear the most, are not going to self-deport nor are they going to tolerate being marginalized.
- LGBT Americans are not going back in the closets you constructed for them and they will no longer be satisfied with anything less than full marriage equality.
- There’s a black guy in the White House and Obamacare is the law of the land. Deal with it.
If any of these facts scare you, tough cookies. We’ve been putting up with Right Wing crap for far too long. The shoe is now on the other foot and there it is destined to remain. Progress is an unstoppable train. Jump on board or get the hell out of the way.
To end on an up note, here’s Jon Stewart’s take on the state of affairs in the GOP. If you are on a mobile device or browser that does not support the video players embedded below, watch on your desktop or laptop computer or CLICK HERE and CLICK HERE to bookmark the host sites for viewing later.
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART airs Monday through Thursday at 11pm E/P. Full episodes are available for next day streaming on Hulu Plus.