North Carolina state Sen. Dan Bishop isn't just your average bigot: He's an egomaniacally offensive one too. Bishop, who is running for an open House seat in the state's 9th Congressional District, compared his attempt to gut LGBTQ protections through the promotion of religious exemptions to the efforts of German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to save more than a thousand Jews during the Holocaust.
Bishop made the comparison in emails with conservative activists in 2017 that were later obtained and were published toward the end of last month by a liberal website, according to HuffPost. At the time, North Carolina's conservatives were in the midst of trying to save face after partial repeal of a bill GOP lawmakers had rammed through the state legislature targeting transgender individuals with discrimination in public restrooms. Bishop was proposing a so-called conscience clause that would allow people in creative fields such as cake-baking to deny service to LGBTQ individuals in the few Tar Heel locales that had enacted protections for gay and/or transgender people. Some conservative activists worried that such an exemption would be too narrow, restricting too much who could discriminate and why. Bishop defended his idea.
“As Oscar Schindler said, as many as we can,” Bishop offered, suggesting some relation between Schindler's efforts to save as many Jews as possible from Nazi extermination to his own efforts to allow as many people as possible to discriminate against LGBTQ Americans. Because saving the lives of innocent victims facing state-sponsored genocide is apparently comparable to targeting disfavored minorities with scorn and derision.
Did we mention that Bishop is the GOP nominee in the Sept. 10 special election do-over for the 9th Congressional District seat after a GOP political operative tampered with mail-in ballots in the previous election?
You can help defeat Bishop by donating to his Democratic challenger, Dan McCready, here.