Stop everything, America: the guy in the middle has a sad.
The Family Research Council, which still has precious little to do with any of those three things,
has a new schtick:
The "traditional marriage"-touting Family Research Council plans to usher in the first annual "Ex-Gay Pride Month" dinner in an attempt to promote "ex-gay" rights. The event is scheduled for the end of July, just weeks after the Supreme Court's landmark rulings in favor of gay rights. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) has been extended an invitation as an honorable attendee. […]
"Come celebrate the lives of former homosexuals and hear about their unique stories and achievements!" reads the invitation.
In addition to Bachman, the Heritage Foundation's Jim DeMint, the Liberty Counsel's Matthew Staver and Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) -- who on Friday introduced a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage -- have all been invited to speak.
The premise here is very nearly adorable, if that's the word I'm looking for, and I'm not sure it is; all of the various anti-gay paranoids of the Family Research Council et. al. will gather 'round a small collection of ex-gay individuals (who also happen to work for the Family Research Council; the whole gimmick is to promote two new ex-gay anti-gay offshoots of the FRC) and hear rousing stories of them no longer being gay because reasons. Over half the featured speakers on the invitation are noted as "invited," which suggests that this thing was either thrown together slapdash or they're having a difficult time convincing upstanding Americans like Jim DeMint and Michele Bachmann to hang out with Americans who until very recently had suffered from gay cooties. (Note that there is a large population among this crowd that believes The Gay is indeed contagious, in that The Gays go around indoctrinating other folks to be The Gay and that's why you have to be so careful to not show gay people on television or, worse, treat them decently under the law; treating gay Americans badly is seen as valid means of discouraging others to "turn gay," because you're showing them how miserable you'll be making their lives if they do. So you
think I'm joking about the "gay cooties" thing, but I'm not. These people are, well, kinda nuts. Kinda really nuts.)
The longer-term premise of the FRC's new ex-gay groups, preciously dubbed Voice of the Voiceless and Equality and Justice for All, appears to be to go around claiming that gay people are discriminating against them by not letting them be not-gay. An interesting approach, as "you're not allowed to discriminate against me because of my sexual preferences" is not generally a sentence in the far-right vocabulary, but it appears the social conservative need to think of themselves as a threatened, marginalized underclass is once again stronger than their need to appear even the slightest bit consistent about things. As the president of one of the new groups puts it:
"[Homosexuality] just wasn't for me," he concluded. "That's why I chose a different path. We really need to accept people in their choices."
Which is almost a touching statement, though it loses at least 90 percent of its sincerity when you've just printed up invitations celebrating your paycheck-based association with one of the nation's loudest and most aggressive advocates for doing the freak'n exact opposite thing. (Again, consistency is not really in the ol' toolkit, though there are
plenty of tools involved.) Also: Really? Your complaint is that gay Americans are insufficiently accepting of you? Unless they're preventing you from getting married to the opposite gender, which they most certainly ain't, what do you care?)
So there's that. No, I don't think "Ex-Gay Pride Month" is going to become a thing, but I'm sure we'll be hearing more from the Family Research Councilites about how The Gays are attacking them for being underprivileged heterosexuals. That will be … interesting.