So homophobic, Jesus can't help you . . .

Randy Short don't like the LGBTQ community or the National Black Caucus

As if the LGBTQ community doesn't have enough to deal with how the Trump Administration is empowering overt attacks on us and our families, even the dregs of bigotry are attempting to take wild shots.

A press conference I referenced earlier this week took place and according to Right Wing Watch, it was a doozy:

Imagine an anti-LGBTQ gathering that included remarks by a trio of aggressively anti-gay activists—Scott Lively, Peter LaBarbera, and Brian Camenker—and now imagine that none of them was the most ridiculous, obnoxious or extreme speaker. Such was the scene at the National Press Club on Tuesday afternoon, where a new group calling itself “Gone Too Far” introduced itself with tirades against the LGBTQ equality movement, the proposed federal Equality Act, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus who support it. 

Three right-wing African American pastors—Randy Short, Stephen Broden and E.W. Jackson—are part of the group’s organizing committee, as are Lively, LaBarbera, and Camenker. (Notably, the latter three were all part of a group of Religious Right leaders who defended Rep. Steve King when he was punished by his House colleagues for his most recent racist comments.) Additional organizing committee members include Arthur Shaper, head of the California branch of Camenker’s MassResistance; Paul Blair, president of Reclaiming America for Christ; and his Oklahoma clergy colleague, Dan Fisher. Blair is also a promoter of “nullification”–the notion that the individual states hold the power to nullify federal laws. 

The press conference began with the blowing of a shofar, prayer, the singing of “Jesus Loves the Little Children” and “God Bless America,” and the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance. When Short took to the podium, things went downhill quickly.

And that is straight downhill.  Among the highlights:

“I want to say to you,” said (Randy) Short, “that the Congressional Black Caucus is the equivalent of a terminal venereal disease on the body of black people in this country, and they cannot take a stand against our people being wiped out.” 

Short went after iconic CBC members by name. He declared Maxine Waters to be a “fraud,” adding there is “nothing black about her—her wig is from Korea.” Of civil rights hero John Lewis, he asked, “What closet are you in, boy? They didn’t beat you enough in the 60s for you to turn on God, turn on your people, turn on morality, turn on the black woman, turn on the black unborn, turn on the black children.” Short called on them all to resign.

Saying, “We don’t need a Hitler; we’ve got LGBTQ,” Short suggested that the equality movement is a conspiracy to spread diseases to the black community and “wipe out an unwanted population of people through immorality.” 

Those people who should know better, who call themselves minority leaders—who know that bowel movement and the blood shed at Edmund Pettus Bridge don’t come together. We’ve got another epidemic brought to us that’s covered up—shingles. Folks sick because folks eat bowel movement in the sexual acts they have, and now they’re injecting children, giving them these diseases, calling it vaccines, because Big Pharma makes so much money off of the new odd diseases that come out of the conduct of these folks.

Then there was his theory that slave owners were gay white men who raped black men to "break them" spiritually. Unfortunately, Short wasn't the only speaker nor (which is really hard to believe) the most out there with the rhetoric.

Next up was Stephen Black, who runs a ministry for “sexually and relationally broken people.” Black said God saved him from his gay-identified “years in darkness” and he denounced efforts by LGBTQ activists to ban conversion therapy for minors. He said the term “gay Christian” is “heresy.”

 . . . . Scott Lively, the notorious globe-trotting anti-LGBTQ activist and author of “The Pink Swastika,”   . . . took special aim at the Equality Act, anti-discrimination legislation that was introduced in the 115th Congress. The Equality Act, Lively said, is not really about equality but about “LGBT supremacy.” Lively denounced former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, author of landmark gay-rights rulings, as “the worst enemy of the family in the history of the Supreme Court.” Lively charged that the Equality Act was meant to accomplish what he said was the LGBT movement’s goal of abolishing laws governing the age of sexual consent, as well as the legalization of prostitution and polygamy. He also said that that the transgender movement is really about promoting the “pedophilia agenda.”

You can read the entire thing here and even listen clips of the speeches if you have a high threshold for foolishness.