When your ideology is founded on bigotry

people will laugh at you for calling others "bigots."

First off, David Neiwert comes up with a reasoned and dispassionate take-down of Jonah Goldberg (which is a little unfair -- Goldberg is such an easy target). Says Goldberg, as quoted by Neiwert:

I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there's the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers.

The hypocrisy is even more glaring. Darwin fish are often stuck next to bumper stickers promoting tolerance or admonishing random motorists that "hate is not a family value." But the whole point of the Darwin fish is intolerance; similar mockery of a cherished symbol would rightly be condemned as bigoted if aimed at blacks or women or, yes, Muslims.

My snarky side says Goldberg wants to reserve the right to aim his bigotry at blacks, women and Muslims for himself. However. . . .

Neiwert comes up with a nice, concise definition of the subject at hand:

Bigotry is usually defined as "stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own," and a bigot as "a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices." Bigotry, as we have known it historically, is not based on rationality or reason -- as the scientific belief in evolution is -- but founded instead on prejudice, inbred beliefs, and supernatural reactionarism.

It therefore follows that, to a bigot, anyone who disagrees with him or her is -- a bigot.

I've been making the connection between the anti-evolutionist Christianists and the anti-gay Christianists for a while, although they are careful to compartmentalize (or maybe it's just that the press is doing it for them). However, Evil Bender notes that Martin Cothran, boy ID apologist, has connected the dots for us. From Cothran:

In case you hadn’t noticed, activist homosexuals take it as a personal affront that you disagree with them. Why? Heterosexuals do not take it as a personal affront if homosexuals disagree with them. So what gives? Why do homosexuals have this deep-seated need to be agreed with? And why the violent reaction when you disagree with them? It has nothing to do with anything you might want to do to them. You may very well want to mind your own business and prefer them to mind theirs (and, possibly, not want their homosexuality waved in your face every five minutes). It’s not what you might do that bothers them: it’s what you believe. They simply can’t stand the fact that you won’t accept what they do.

This is quite obviously bullshit, which sort of summarizes Cothran's whole diatribe. He misses the point from the very beginning. The reality is that they simply can't believe that you refuse to credit what's right in front of your face. Cothran's post starts off in high dudgeon about Ed Brayton's mention of a study noting that more homophobic men respond more readily to homoerotic imagery than less homophobic men do. Cothran offers nothing to refute the findings of the study: it's all part of the "hommaseksual agenda." Here's his first paragraph:

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars is touting a study recently published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology that finds "homophobic" men (whatever "homophobic" means) are more aroused by homoerotic imagery than "non-homophobic" men (whatever "non-homophobic" means). And by "touting" I mean that Brayton indicates that these findings are "interesting"--by which I think he means "I would really like them to be true because they comport with my scientistic assumptions about the world and so I am willing to grant them immediate provisional credibility by using the term 'interesting' rather than, say, 'patently absurd'."

Anyone who knows anything about human psychology (which Cothran obviously does not, any more than he knows anything about evolutionary theory) knows that it's highly likely that those who hold the greatest degree of homophobia are probably going to be those who are least secure in their heterosexuality -- being gay is something they're very much afraid of. Cothran's pose of superiority (and trust me, it's nothing more than a pose, and a desperately held one at that) carries through the entire post, elevating it to about an eighth-grade level -- you know, about the time kids discover sarcasm.

If you need more examples, just think about the violations of Sally Kern's "right to free speech" (which in the conservative lexicon is defined as "I can say whatever nasty and mean-spirited things I want and no one can criticize me for it") and the California case against the UC for refusing to accept Biblical creationism as a valid biology credit -- a violation of religious freedom. It's also the way that abstinence-only advocates can continue to call for funding of programs that have been demonstrated to be ineffective.

There's a functional blindness here that seems to grow organically out of the mindset. I have to confess to a basic inability to understand people who don't question what they're told. I was a horrible child -- at age two I started asking "Why?", refused to take "Because I said so" as a legitimate answer, and never stopped. Drove my parents nuts, but I was introduced to the ideas of rational inquiry and free discussion. Sure, I'll entertain your wingnut idea -- just give me good, logically consistent reasons based in reality for accepting it.

However, if you start calling me names, I'm just going to conclude you're a bigot.