Former Reagan and Bush 43 administration official Robert Reilly has rolled out a new book, "Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything." Yesterday, Christian radio host Janet Mefferd invited him onto her show to talk about it. While talking his book up, Reilly actually suggested that gays and lesbians are actually worse than people who kill. People For the American Way got a clip.
After the person murders someone or looks at pornography, they come to see that what they did was actually wrong, they can’t excuse it and moral order is restored and they’re contrite for having done so. But what if you organize your life around something that is wrong? Then you must construct a more permanent rationalization that prevents your conscience from returning to tell you that you’ve just done something profoundly wrong.
This is exactly the case with active homosexuals, now extended to homosexual marriage, where they have to say that wrong is right and not only is it right but it’s normative, morally normative, so we need to teach it, we need to bless it in marriages, we need to ordain it in churches and we need to enforce it in our laws. And that is what is happening.
So let's get this straight. Simply being in a same-sex relationship puts you in the same category as cold-blooded killers? Even by right-wing standards, this is positively breathtaking.
Listen to the whole interview here--the bit I mentioned starts at the 4:40 mark. Reilly says that he takes a "logical" approach to arguing against homosexuality, in apparent response to the hackles raised against those who argue against it on religious grounds. He also says that gays know what they're doing is wrong deep down inside--they're just rationalizing it away. Suffice to say that Reilly's logic is severely warped. Mefferd was absolutely fawning over him, and says one of her producers can't put that book down. Not entirely surprising coming from a woman who called Troy Newman a hero even though he still has convicted clinic-bomber and likely accessory to murder Cheryl Sullenger on his payroll.
I have to wonder if this is the same mentality that has resulted in some countries passing odious laws against homosexuality. We all know about Uganda's odious law that makes it a crime not to tell the police that you know someone is gay, as well as Russia's hideous "gay propaganda" law. But I have to wonder if the logical end to this kind of thinking is a law recently rolled out in Brunei, which calls for gays to be stoned to death. After all, if most of these people had their way, homosexuality would be a capital offense in this country.