#Maybe its my ethics saying “never exclude anyone! Never deny anyone the right to be seen and heard!”

[julietakesoncomm380-blog]

*February 13*

In this essay, I will examine the critical questions: What is a narrative that is important to me or U.S. culture? What truths does it promote? What truths does it limit or ignore? What are the societal/ethical advantages and the disadvantages of this narrative?

To investigate these questions, I analyzed season 5 episode 9 (“99”) and 10 (“Game Night”) of Brooklyn 99. By combining tone with word choice, as well as chronicling the events following Rosa’s coming out, the two episodes of Brooklyn 99 share a narrative that coming out with regard to sexuality can be scary. Overall, this narrative is productive for society because it shows the complication of the process and does not paint a potentially harmful and inaccurate picture by showing either all acceptance or all rejection.   

Brooklyn 99 is a comedy about a fictional New York City police precinct. It follows the work of the precinct, as well as the relationships between the detectives themselves as well as with their captain inside and outside of work. Jake is the funny one, Amy is the nerdy one, Charles is the pathetically adorable friend to all, Terry is the big teddy bear who can also lift a thousand pounds, Rosa is a private, tough, Latina, and Captain Holt is the all business, homosexual, African American captain. In “99”, the squad attempts to get Captain Holt back to New York from LA in time for a job with the commissioner. Charles gets a little nosy and Rosa ultimately comes out to him. In “Game Night”, Rosa Diaz comes outs to the rest of the squad and her family, which is the storyline I have chosen to follow.

Palczewski explains that narratives are everywhere, and often times, they do a lot of things. Narratives often teach cultural values or lessons that are widely accepted in that culture. This idea goes hand in hand with the concept of social truth. Social truth is “beliefs and values that do not refer to some objective reality, but to social reality – those beliefs about what is right that people have arrived at together,” (133). Narratives are also interesting and enjoyable to the audience, but while being that, they can educate their audience and allow for new perspectives to be seen. Narratives include events that then in turn cause other events, or at the very least are related to one another.

One of the narratives evident in these episodes of Brooklyn 99 is that coming out can be scary. When Rosa actually comes out, her word choice and tone tell us this narrative. When Rosa hesitantly comes out to Charles, she tells him quietly and almost ashamedly, “I didn’t say anything about being bi because I didn’t think it was anyone’s business and I also didn’t want anything to change,” and in that case, she had nothing to be scared of, as Charles was supportive. Her word choice tells us she was hiding this part of herself and not necessarily looking forward to any consequences that came with telling people. Another instance in which these episodes promotes the truth that coming out is frightening using word choice and tone is when Rosa comes out to her parents. She takes Jake out to dinner and invites her parents without telling him, hurriedly and panickily insisting to Jake that “This is happening and I need you to be here with me and maybe just step in and do it for me,” which is later followed up by a defeated “I thought I was ready to do this but I’m not.” Rosa’s word choice clearly shows that she is uncomfortable and anxious about coming out to her parents, and though a friend’s support would help, it ultimately does not end up making it any easier. Her tone reflects her uneasiness and eventual change of mind in regard to her coming out. Combined, her word choice and tone make it clear that she is not having an easy time doing this and she is concerned about the consequences.

In “Game Night”, the events following Rosa coming out to the squad are shown and these events continue the narrative that coming out can be terrifying. After coming out to her coworkers, Rosa fields numerous questions, including: How long have you known? What made you decide to tell us now? Are you seeing anyone now? And one so “not tasteful” it was not even asked. Questioning Rosa’s personal life is something the squad somehow feels entitled to despite Rosa never being a very open person before. Becoming more open and vulnerable to people whom were usually left in the dark can be terrifying. Rosa responds with short answers and still tries to keep as much private as possible. There is also the possibility that things would not have gone as smoothly as they did for Rosa. Captain Holt says, “I must say, this is going considerably better than when I came out to my colleagues.” This instance also shows the truth that coming out can be scary. Captain Holt’s coworkers were “not, as the kids say, awake” and it showed, because they seemingly did not accept him. The portrayal of both stories here is important and both still continue the narrative that coming out can be scary. Coming out, you kind of never know how people are going to react. There will likely be a barrage of questions that you really do not feel like answering, and then there is also the fact that people could act negatively, sometimes to the point of violence, and you do not know if that is going to happen.

While showing the squad’s reaction, “Game Night” also show Rosa’s family’s reaction to her coming out and follow the events that come afterwards, again continuing the narrative that coming out can be scary. At Rosa’s following family game night, her father tells her “no matter what you call yourself, you still like men. So, you can still get married and have a child.” When Rosa replies she can do that with either a man or a woman, he replies “Yes, but it will be a man because this is just a phase,” and later tells her “There’s no such thing as being bisexual.” This narrative that coming out can be scary continues because Rosa’s parents, the people who created her, are denying that a part of their child exists. And while a person’s sexuality is not all they are, it is still a part of them and for Rosa’s parents to tell her that she is wrong in that or deny that part of her exists proves how scary coming out can be. It is just one more part of your identity, but it is a part of your identity that can completely change how people feel about you. This event has shown things changing, and change is always frightening. Another event that perpetrates this truth is when Rosa’s father comes to talk with her after she has come out to her parents. While her father accepts her, “Mom needs a little more time,” and he feels it would be best to “put game night on hold for a little while.” Rosa revealing a part of her identity has changed her family drastically. Coming out also means facing those changes that you cannot control, yet still happen. This ties into the idea of social truths. For some, especially more recently, it has become a social truth that being a part of the LGBTQ+ community is normal and acceptable. For others, such as Rosa’s traditional and conservative parents, it is a social truth that being a part of that community is wrong. Social truths depend on your audience. Rosa knows this, and that is in part why she is a little less anxious to come out to her coworkers than she is coming out to her parents.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to this narrative that coming out is scary. It is beneficial to those who may not be out to see the reality of what could happen. After Rosa’s family cancels family game night, the squad stands in, creates a comforting community for Rosa, and has their own family game night. I think it is really important to show that some people could need some time and may not react as well as you would like, while others will act as if nothing has changed. Portraying an audience that all received the news well could be creating a false image for viewers of the show which could then lead to a harsh reality shock, so it is beneficial that there is some negative response to Rosa’s coming out. It is also helpful to those who are already out to possibly see their story portrayed in a television show to create a sense of validation. A possible disadvantage is that it does not show what happens if neither your friends nor family accept you, although many people who can control their coming out chose to do so when they feel safe. I do think overall, its largely beneficial to society because it does show both extremes of reality and shows that while some may not accept you, there are many who will. Besides all of this, it is showing that being LGBTQ+ is real and okay. For some reason, having an LGBTQ+ character on a show is still rare, so any normalization of being part of that community is a great thing for the community. There is a community of people that have both accepted and chosen to love Rosa the way she is. Rosa is not portrayed as a bad character or by using stereotypes. They have added another identity to her character, but she is the same Rosa as she was in season one.

Valentine further explains how narratives, particularly for the LGBTQ+ community, work in practice. For a community that has been so excluded and marginalized, a collection of public narratives is so important. Before LGBTQ+ people were telling their stories, there were people who did not know how to tell their stories because they did not have the correct language for it, they did not have the community. That has changed through the production of narratives in the LGBTQ+ community. There are new stories, and new ways of telling those stories. Most basic is the oral history, but it ranges from dramatic monologues to comics to portraits to music. But the presence of all these other types of storytelling is all thanks to the oral history. It created a community that developed in so many ways. Rosa is contributing her story to this community. She is making LGBTQ+ storytelling for other a little bit easier by telling her own story. Captain Holt tells Rosa, “Every time someone steps up and says who they are, the world becomes a better, more interesting place. So, thank you.” Telling her story not only makes the world a better place, but it allows for that to continue. Her story will help others express their stories, continuously making the world a better and more interesting place. It is thanks to people before Rosa coming out that she had the ability to tell and share her story, so it will be thanks to Rosa, as well as people before her, that people will continue to do so. These narratives, especially on television, allow for these stories to not only be given and listened to within the LGBTQ+ community, but with the world. The values and ideas these stories portray are becoming more and more wide-reaching and more and more accepted.

In summary, the two episodes of Brooklyn 99 following Rosa’s coming out share a narrative that coming out can be frightening. Word choice and tone make this obvious in her actual coming out, while the events following make it clear later on. They show both realities of the consequences to coming out while creating a strong sense of community and overall benefit the audience in this way.

“Game Night.” Brooklyn 99: Season 5, written by Justin Noble and Carly Hallam Tosh, directed by Tristram Shapeero, FOX, 2017.

Palczewski, Catherine Helen, et al. Rhetoric in Civic Life. Strata Publishing, 2012.

Valentine, James. “Narrative Acts: Telling Tales of Life and Love with the Wrong Gender.” Forum Qualitative Social Research, vol. 9, no. 2, 2008, http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/viewFile/412/896

“99.” Brooklyn 99: Season 5, written by Andy Bobrow, directed by Payman Benz, FOX, 2017.

[nasimabbas]

Erick Erickson, It’s Time to Get Out of Pete Buttigieg’s Bedroom

William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via GettyErick Erickson really doesn’t like that presidential primary candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg is gay, and refuses to “repent” for his sin of having gay sex.Erickson has much to say about it, an exhausting amount. For all that they profess their disgust about it, isn’t it strange, the amount of time anti-gay folks like to spend obsessing about the sex gay people have?The conservative blogger, radio host, and former CNN commentator was back on his anti-gay, anti-Buttigieg crusade again Wednesday in a column on his blog Resurgent, where he also made the startling claim that Buttigieg has less humility than that well-known trepidatious wallflower President Trump.Why Does Anyone Take Erick Erickson Seriously?Noting that Trump “has said more than once he has never felt the need to repent for anything,” and why this should lead evangelicals to question their cheering “everything he does,” Erickson added: “Pete Buttigieg is a practicing homosexual who willfully refuses to recognize Holy Scripture identifies that as a sin.”On Friday, Erickson will be joined by Vice President Mike Pence on stage at the Resurgent Gathering in Atlanta, for a conversation “about the Trump administration’s policies and plans for a second term.” Whether Buttigieg and LGBT-related matters will be raised remains to be seen.According to my colleague Adam Rawnsley, Erickson has written at least 19 tweets referencing Buttigieg since April—it’s hard to tell how many precisely because he has deleted his recent Twitter history. On Resurgent Erickson has written six times about Buttigieg since April, with five columns written on April 8 and April 9, and the sixth this week. (He has written about Joe Biden seven times.)The tweets, columns, and condemnation suggest Erickson is truly vexed not just by Buttigieg and his sexuality, but also furious that he invokes his own faith when challenging Trump and his supporters.Buttigieg’s resonant faith message is to remind fellow Christians what the meaning of that faith is in terms of their duty to treat fellow humans decently. What really rankles Erickson, and others like him, is that it is a gay man doing the truth-telling. When it comes to homosexuality, evangelical Christians like Erickson hate gay sex (which they seem bizarrely focused on), and like the sinner to know their place. Buttigieg is a total mind-scramble for them: out, proud, partnered, married, and using his own Christian faith to call out faith-based prejudice, and to question evangelicals’ support of Trump.This week, Erickson said Trump was different from Buttigieg in that he “does not lecture Christians about their faith and Buttigieg has made it a central part of his campaign.”Erickson also tweeted about it, in case we hadn’t heard: “Trump has said he has never felt the need to repent. Buttigieg doesn’t feel the need to repent of his sexual sins. Between them, only Trump possesses the humility to not lecture Christians about their faith given his unrepentant state.”Erickson also linked to a clip from the first Democratic debate this week, where Buttigieg said: “The minimum wage is just too low. And so-called conservative Christian senators right now in the Senate are blocking a bill to raise the minimum wage when scripture says that ‘Whoever oppresses the poor taunts their maker.’”Cue more Erickson pique: “Hey Mayor Pete, you know what else scripture says?” he tweeted. If this wasn’t yet another tired yowl about sinful gay sex, maybe Erickson could enlighten us otherwise.The April flurry of homophobic spite came after Buttigieg had spoken about the anti-LGBT Pence: “If me being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade. And that’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand: that if you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me—your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”Buttigieg had also queried evangelicals’ support of the president. “It’s something that really frustrates me because the hypocrisy is unbelievable,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press on April 7. “Here you have somebody who not only acts in a way that is not consistent with anything that I hear in scripture in church.”On April 8, all this seems to have made Erickson’s head start spinning wildly. He accused Buttigieg of hypocrisy, because apparently as a gay man, he had no business lecturing anyone else about Christian anything. Or as Erickson put it: “Buttigieg wants to use the social obligations as Christians against the President, but wants to avoid any implication on the personal obligations of Christians in terms of clear Biblical sexual ethics.” On the same day, under the drily disingenuous headline,“I Actually Wasn’t Going To Say This Because I’ve Offended Enough People Today, But…”, Erickson opined: “No sin is immutable. Buttigieg has decided his sin is and, in trying to reconcile his faith to his sexuality, has departed from orthodoxy in determining his sin is therefore not sin despite the very plain and clear teachings of scripture.” And then, in a third column in one day, he puzzlingly accused Buttigieg of “trying to have it both ways” around abortion, and refugees, and the poor.On the same day—April 8 seems to have been a really big bad gay day in Erickson-ville, our embattled protagonist buffeted by rainbow flags—in a now-deleted tweet, Erickson began defending poor defenseless Pence. “Mike Pence has said nothing about Buttigieg. Pence lives rent free in the man’s head. His willingness to use Pence as the basis for his unprovoked attacks on orthodox Christianity suggests Buttigieg is not really the Christian he claims to be.”Mike Pence’s animus towards LGBT people is well-documented. Buttigieg wasn’t attacking his faith; he was questioning Pence’s use of that faith to rationalize prejudice and enact harmful laws against LGBT people. In his anti-LGBT prejudice, Pence, Buttigieg said, was also challenging God.Erickson wasn’t done that day. “I mean if Buttigieg thinks evangelicals should be supporting him instead of Trump, he fundamentally does not understand the roots of Christianity. But then he is an Episcopalian, so he might not actually understand Christianity more than superficially.”For Erickson, being Episcopalian seems to count as Christianity lite, and as such is another useful weapon to attack Buttigieg with.When Buttigieg said, “The Vice President is entitled to his religious beliefs. My problem is when those religious beliefs are used as an excuse to harm other people,” Erickson responded via Twitter: “Declining to bake a cake for a wedding isn’t harming anyone, particularly when the business will bake the same person anything else.” On that basis, presumably, Erickson would be fine about cake shops, hotels, whoever, refusing service to straight people, just because they feel like it. So, any business that wants to refuse service to Erick Erickson, go ahead—he supports your right to do so, and he’s happy to buy whatever it is he needs someplace else.On April 9, Erickson wrote a column, his fourth in two days about Buttigieg, accusing him of being intolerant about Mike Pence’s “faithful” Christianity. “Buttigieg is just another in a long line of Democrats who are willing to punish Christians for living out their faith,” Erickson concluded.No, people who object to “religious liberty” being used as a battering ram against LGBT people are doing so because it is precisely that: It uses faith to blanket-justify discrimination. It uses faith to exclude and demean people. “Religious liberty” is an abuse of good faith.On the same day, in his fifth column in two days about Buttigieg, Erickson wrote in response to a religion-based inquiry from my colleague Scott Bixby (who went on to write this piece): “Buttigieg attacks the President for not governing as a moral person on one hand and on the other claims we cannot govern morally when it comes to abortion. He has married another man, which runs contrary to scripture, and he not only thinks it is not sin, but thinks God made him that way, all of which is contrary to Christian orthodoxy.”Again, all that Erickson has are mythical Bible passages—there are none about marriage equality—and poisonous, personal insults about Buttigieg’s sexuality and beliefs. Cheap, ungodly insults at that.“Opposition to Buttigieg should not be about his religion or his sexuality,” Erickson wrote (how kind and reasonable—even though that is what he had been relentlessly invoking himself!), “but should be because he masks his far left positions behind a smile.”Another spurious insult. Of all the candidates, Buttigieg, whether you agree with him or not, states his views with sober clarity.On July 27, Erickson tweeted a video clip and article from The Hill, in which Buttigieg opined, utterly calmly: “My generation saw this country elect its first black president and then turn around and elect a racist to the White House and we ought to call that what it is.”Erickson’s tweet read: “Notice how Butter Judge is getting more heated in his rhetoric as he starts getting left behind in the polls.” There is nothing “heated” about Buttigieg’s delivery in the clip; quite the opposite.For many years, and now in the Trump administration with Pence at their vanguard, evangelical Christians have sought to influence anti-LGBT law-making. The Trump administration has, as The Daily Beast has reported, been very receptive to them—President Trump wants the evangelical vote, and for him LGBT people and rights are necessary casualties in securing it.Trump and Pence are fully signed up to the “religious liberty” agenda, which seeks to deny LGBT rights and equality via the weird notion that by according LGBT people equal access in the buying of wedding cakes and other goods and services, this somehow counts as persecution against anti-LGBT Christians who should have every right—by dint of their faith—to discriminate against LGBT people.What seems to upset Erickson and his ilk is that a gay man of faith is calling them out on these hypocritical perversions of faith. And Buttigieg is using his own faith and his beliefs to call them out. Rarely are religious bigots challenged so squarely on their own turf by someone they’re usually so comfortable in condemning. If they bothered listening to Buttigieg, they would realize that he—with an impressive amount of patience and open-heartedness, given the bigotry he has faced from the likes of Erickson—was reminding them what the true meaning of faith and Christianity is.Possibly, this is the first salvo in a wider Republican Party return to the old dirty playbook of using someone’s sexuality against them. But sadly for Erickson and Co., Buttigieg is open not just about who he is but also who he loves. Indeed this openness has been questioned by some LGBT people, who have wondered if Buttigieg is “gay enough.” Perhaps those critics of Buttigieg, when they read the words of authors like Erickson, will realize that now is not the time to fight over slices of liberal-piety cake. The more immediate bogeyman is, sadly, an old and all-too-familiar one: pure and simple prejudice. Pete Buttigieg is the target of those who seek to hurt people, to diminish them, to encourage people not to vote for them, because they are gay. That’s it. This hoary, dusty relic is one apparently we must confront again. You may not want to vote for Buttigieg, you may disagree with him about his policies, you may wish he was “gayer” on and off the debate stage. But he is also a gay man in public life having to put up with crude, homophobic attacks. Hopefully that is “gay enough” to count as a reason to speak up for him—alongside common decency.Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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via Blogger https://ift.tt/2KBj9Wz August 04, 2019 at 05:24AM

[weopenviews]

William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via GettyErick Erickson really doesn’t like that presidential primary candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg is gay, and refuses to “repent” for his sin of having gay sex.Erickson has much to say about it, an exhausting amount. For all that they profess their disgust about it, isn’t it strange, the amount of time anti-gay folks like to spend obsessing about the sex gay people have?The conservative blogger, radio host, and former CNN commentator was back on his anti-gay, anti-Buttigieg crusade again Wednesday in a column on his blog Resurgent, where he also made the startling claim that Buttigieg has less humility than that well-known trepidatious wallflower President Trump.Why Does Anyone Take Erick Erickson Seriously?Noting that Trump “has said more than once he has never felt the need to repent for anything,” and why this should lead evangelicals to question their cheering “everything he does,” Erickson added: “Pete Buttigieg is a practicing homosexual who willfully refuses to recognize Holy Scripture identifies that as a sin.”On Friday, Erickson will be joined by Vice President Mike Pence on stage at the Resurgent Gathering in Atlanta, for a conversation “about the Trump administration’s policies and plans for a second term.” Whether Buttigieg and LGBT-related matters will be raised remains to be seen.According to my colleague Adam Rawnsley, Erickson has written at least 19 tweets referencing Buttigieg since April—it’s hard to tell how many precisely because he has deleted his recent Twitter history. On Resurgent Erickson has written six times about Buttigieg since April, with five columns written on April 8 and April 9, and the sixth this week. (He has written about Joe Biden seven times.)The tweets, columns, and condemnation suggest Erickson is truly vexed not just by Buttigieg and his sexuality, but also furious that he invokes his own faith when challenging Trump and his supporters.Buttigieg’s resonant faith message is to remind fellow Christians what the meaning of that faith is in terms of their duty to treat fellow humans decently. What really rankles Erickson, and others like him, is that it is a gay man doing the truth-telling. When it comes to homosexuality, evangelical Christians like Erickson hate gay sex (which they seem bizarrely focused on), and like the sinner to know their place. Buttigieg is a total mind-scramble for them: out, proud, partnered, married, and using his own Christian faith to call out faith-based prejudice, and to question evangelicals’ support of Trump.This week, Erickson said Trump was different from Buttigieg in that he “does not lecture Christians about their faith and Buttigieg has made it a central part of his campaign.”Erickson also tweeted about it, in case we hadn’t heard: “Trump has said he has never felt the need to repent. Buttigieg doesn’t feel the need to repent of his sexual sins. Between them, only Trump possesses the humility to not lecture Christians about their faith given his unrepentant state.”Erickson also linked to a clip from the first Democratic debate this week, where Buttigieg said: “The minimum wage is just too low. And so-called conservative Christian senators right now in the Senate are blocking a bill to raise the minimum wage when scripture says that ‘Whoever oppresses the poor taunts their maker.’”Cue more Erickson pique: “Hey Mayor Pete, you know what else scripture says?” he tweeted. If this wasn’t yet another tired yowl about sinful gay sex, maybe Erickson could enlighten us otherwise.The April flurry of homophobic spite came after Buttigieg had spoken about the anti-LGBT Pence: “If me being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade. And that’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand: that if you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me—your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”Buttigieg had also queried evangelicals’ support of the president. “It’s something that really frustrates me because the hypocrisy is unbelievable,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press on April 7. “Here you have somebody who not only acts in a way that is not consistent with anything that I hear in scripture in church.”On April 8, all this seems to have made Erickson’s head start spinning wildly. He accused Buttigieg of hypocrisy, because apparently as a gay man, he had no business lecturing anyone else about Christian anything. Or as Erickson put it: “Buttigieg wants to use the social obligations as Christians against the President, but wants to avoid any implication on the personal obligations of Christians in terms of clear Biblical sexual ethics.” On the same day, under the drily disingenuous headline,“I Actually Wasn’t Going To Say This Because I’ve Offended Enough People Today, But…”, Erickson opined: “No sin is immutable. Buttigieg has decided his sin is and, in trying to reconcile his faith to his sexuality, has departed from orthodoxy in determining his sin is therefore not sin despite the very plain and clear teachings of scripture.” And then, in a third column in one day, he puzzlingly accused Buttigieg of “trying to have it both ways” around abortion, and refugees, and the poor.On the same day—April 8 seems to have been a really big bad gay day in Erickson-ville, our embattled protagonist buffeted by rainbow flags—in a now-deleted tweet, Erickson began defending poor defenseless Pence. “Mike Pence has said nothing about Buttigieg. Pence lives rent free in the man’s head. His willingness to use Pence as the basis for his unprovoked attacks on orthodox Christianity suggests Buttigieg is not really the Christian he claims to be.”Mike Pence’s animus towards LGBT people is well-documented. Buttigieg wasn’t attacking his faith; he was questioning Pence’s use of that faith to rationalize prejudice and enact harmful laws against LGBT people. In his anti-LGBT prejudice, Pence, Buttigieg said, was also challenging God.Erickson wasn’t done that day. “I mean if Buttigieg thinks evangelicals should be supporting him instead of Trump, he fundamentally does not understand the roots of Christianity. But then he is an Episcopalian, so he might not actually understand Christianity more than superficially.”For Erickson, being Episcopalian seems to count as Christianity lite, and as such is another useful weapon to attack Buttigieg with.When Buttigieg said, “The Vice President is entitled to his religious beliefs. My problem is when those religious beliefs are used as an excuse to harm other people,” Erickson responded via Twitter: “Declining to bake a cake for a wedding isn’t harming anyone, particularly when the business will bake the same person anything else.” On that basis, presumably, Erickson would be fine about cake shops, hotels, whoever, refusing service to straight people, just because they feel like it. So, any business that wants to refuse service to Erick Erickson, go ahead—he supports your right to do so, and he’s happy to buy whatever it is he needs someplace else.On April 9, Erickson wrote a column, his fourth in two days about Buttigieg, accusing him of being intolerant about Mike Pence’s “faithful” Christianity. “Buttigieg is just another in a long line of Democrats who are willing to punish Christians for living out their faith,” Erickson concluded.No, people who object to “religious liberty” being used as a battering ram against LGBT people are doing so because it is precisely that: It uses faith to blanket-justify discrimination. It uses faith to exclude and demean people. “Religious liberty” is an abuse of good faith.On the same day, in his fifth column in two days about Buttigieg, Erickson wrote in response to a religion-based inquiry from my colleague Scott Bixby (who went on to write this piece): “Buttigieg attacks the President for not governing as a moral person on one hand and on the other claims we cannot govern morally when it comes to abortion. He has married another man, which runs contrary to scripture, and he not only thinks it is not sin, but thinks God made him that way, all of which is contrary to Christian orthodoxy.”Again, all that Erickson has are mythical Bible passages—there are none about marriage equality—and poisonous, personal insults about Buttigieg’s sexuality and beliefs. Cheap, ungodly insults at that.“Opposition to Buttigieg should not be about his religion or his sexuality,” Erickson wrote (how kind and reasonable—even though that is what he had been relentlessly invoking himself!), “but should be because he masks his far left positions behind a smile.”Another spurious insult. Of all the candidates, Buttigieg, whether you agree with him or not, states his views with sober clarity.On July 27, Erickson tweeted a video clip and article from The Hill, in which Buttigieg opined, utterly calmly: “My generation saw this country elect its first black president and then turn around and elect a racist to the White House and we ought to call that what it is.”Erickson’s tweet read: “Notice how Butter Judge is getting more heated in his rhetoric as he starts getting left behind in the polls.” There is nothing “heated” about Buttigieg’s delivery in the clip; quite the opposite.For many years, and now in the Trump administration with Pence at their vanguard, evangelical Christians have sought to influence anti-LGBT law-making. The Trump administration has, as The Daily Beast has reported, been very receptive to them—President Trump wants the evangelical vote, and for him LGBT people and rights are necessary casualties in securing it.Trump and Pence are fully signed up to the “religious liberty” agenda, which seeks to deny LGBT rights and equality via the weird notion that by according LGBT people equal access in the buying of wedding cakes and other goods and services, this somehow counts as persecution against anti-LGBT Christians who should have every right—by dint of their faith—to discriminate against LGBT people.What seems to upset Erickson and his ilk is that a gay man of faith is calling them out on these hypocritical perversions of faith. And Buttigieg is using his own faith and his beliefs to call them out. Rarely are religious bigots challenged so squarely on their own turf by someone they’re usually so comfortable in condemning. If they bothered listening to Buttigieg, they would realize that he—with an impressive amount of patience and open-heartedness, given the bigotry he has faced from the likes of Erickson—was reminding them what the true meaning of faith and Christianity is.Possibly, this is the first salvo in a wider Republican Party return to the old dirty playbook of using someone’s sexuality against them. But sadly for Erickson and Co., Buttigieg is open not just about who he is but also who he loves. Indeed this openness has been questioned by some LGBT people, who have wondered if Buttigieg is “gay enough.” Perhaps those critics of Buttigieg, when they read the words of authors like Erickson, will realize that now is not the time to fight over slices of liberal-piety cake. The more immediate bogeyman is, sadly, an old and all-too-familiar one: pure and simple prejudice. Pete Buttigieg is the target of those who seek to hurt people, to diminish them, to encourage people not to vote for them, because they are gay. That’s it. This hoary, dusty relic is one apparently we must confront again. You may not want to vote for Buttigieg, you may disagree with him about his policies, you may wish he was “gayer” on and off the debate stage. But he is also a gay man in public life having to put up with crude, homophobic attacks. Hopefully that is “gay enough” to count as a reason to speak up for him—alongside common decency.Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[worldnews-blog]

William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via GettyErick Erickson really doesn’t like that presidential primary candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg is gay, and refuses to “repent” for his sin of having gay sex.Erickson has much to say about it, an exhausting amount. For all that they profess their disgust about it, isn’t it strange, the amount of time anti-gay folks like to spend obsessing about the sex gay people have?The conservative blogger, radio host, and former CNN commentator was back on his anti-gay, anti-Buttigieg crusade again Wednesday in a column on his blog Resurgent, where he also made the startling claim that Buttigieg has less humility than that well-known trepidatious wallflower President Trump.Why Does Anyone Take Erick Erickson Seriously?Noting that Trump “has said more than once he has never felt the need to repent for anything,” and why this should lead evangelicals to question their cheering “everything he does,” Erickson added: “Pete Buttigieg is a practicing homosexual who willfully refuses to recognize Holy Scripture identifies that as a sin.”On Friday, Erickson will be joined by Vice President Mike Pence on stage at the Resurgent Gathering in Atlanta, for a conversation “about the Trump administration’s policies and plans for a second term.” Whether Buttigieg and LGBT-related matters will be raised remains to be seen.According to my colleague Adam Rawnsley, Erickson has written at least 19 tweets referencing Buttigieg since April—it’s hard to tell how many precisely because he has deleted his recent Twitter history. On Resurgent Erickson has written six times about Buttigieg since April, with five columns written on April 8 and April 9, and the sixth this week. (He has written about Joe Biden seven times.)The tweets, columns, and condemnation suggest Erickson is truly vexed not just by Buttigieg and his sexuality, but also furious that he invokes his own faith when challenging Trump and his supporters.Buttigieg’s resonant faith message is to remind fellow Christians what the meaning of that faith is in terms of their duty to treat fellow humans decently. What really rankles Erickson, and others like him, is that it is a gay man doing the truth-telling. When it comes to homosexuality, evangelical Christians like Erickson hate gay sex (which they seem bizarrely focused on), and like the sinner to know their place. Buttigieg is a total mind-scramble for them: out, proud, partnered, married, and using his own Christian faith to call out faith-based prejudice, and to question evangelicals’ support of Trump.This week, Erickson said Trump was different from Buttigieg in that he “does not lecture Christians about their faith and Buttigieg has made it a central part of his campaign.”Erickson also tweeted about it, in case we hadn’t heard: “Trump has said he has never felt the need to repent. Buttigieg doesn’t feel the need to repent of his sexual sins. Between them, only Trump possesses the humility to not lecture Christians about their faith given his unrepentant state.”Erickson also linked to a clip from the first Democratic debate this week, where Buttigieg said: “The minimum wage is just too low. And so-called conservative Christian senators right now in the Senate are blocking a bill to raise the minimum wage when scripture says that ‘Whoever oppresses the poor taunts their maker.’”Cue more Erickson pique: “Hey Mayor Pete, you know what else scripture says?” he tweeted. If this wasn’t yet another tired yowl about sinful gay sex, maybe Erickson could enlighten us otherwise.The April flurry of homophobic spite came after Buttigieg had spoken about the anti-LGBT Pence: “If me being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade. And that’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand: that if you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me—your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”Buttigieg had also queried evangelicals’ support of the president. “It’s something that really frustrates me because the hypocrisy is unbelievable,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press on April 7. “Here you have somebody who not only acts in a way that is not consistent with anything that I hear in scripture in church.”On April 8, all this seems to have made Erickson’s head start spinning wildly. He accused Buttigieg of hypocrisy, because apparently as a gay man, he had no business lecturing anyone else about Christian anything. Or as Erickson put it: “Buttigieg wants to use the social obligations as Christians against the President, but wants to avoid any implication on the personal obligations of Christians in terms of clear Biblical sexual ethics.” On the same day, under the drily disingenuous headline,“I Actually Wasn’t Going To Say This Because I’ve Offended Enough People Today, But…”, Erickson opined: “No sin is immutable. Buttigieg has decided his sin is and, in trying to reconcile his faith to his sexuality, has departed from orthodoxy in determining his sin is therefore not sin despite the very plain and clear teachings of scripture.” And then, in a third column in one day, he puzzlingly accused Buttigieg of “trying to have it both ways” around abortion, and refugees, and the poor.On the same day—April 8 seems to have been a really big bad gay day in Erickson-ville, our embattled protagonist buffeted by rainbow flags—in a now-deleted tweet, Erickson began defending poor defenseless Pence. “Mike Pence has said nothing about Buttigieg. Pence lives rent free in the man’s head. His willingness to use Pence as the basis for his unprovoked attacks on orthodox Christianity suggests Buttigieg is not really the Christian he claims to be.”Mike Pence’s animus towards LGBT people is well-documented. Buttigieg wasn’t attacking his faith; he was questioning Pence’s use of that faith to rationalize prejudice and enact harmful laws against LGBT people. In his anti-LGBT prejudice, Pence, Buttigieg said, was also challenging God.Erickson wasn’t done that day. “I mean if Buttigieg thinks evangelicals should be supporting him instead of Trump, he fundamentally does not understand the roots of Christianity. But then he is an Episcopalian, so he might not actually understand Christianity more than superficially.”For Erickson, being Episcopalian seems to count as Christianity lite, and as such is another useful weapon to attack Buttigieg with.When Buttigieg said, “The Vice President is entitled to his religious beliefs. My problem is when those religious beliefs are used as an excuse to harm other people,” Erickson responded via Twitter: “Declining to bake a cake for a wedding isn’t harming anyone, particularly when the business will bake the same person anything else.” On that basis, presumably, Erickson would be fine about cake shops, hotels, whoever, refusing service to straight people, just because they feel like it. So, any business that wants to refuse service to Erick Erickson, go ahead—he supports your right to do so, and he’s happy to buy whatever it is he needs someplace else.On April 9, Erickson wrote a column, his fourth in two days about Buttigieg, accusing him of being intolerant about Mike Pence’s “faithful” Christianity. “Buttigieg is just another in a long line of Democrats who are willing to punish Christians for living out their faith,” Erickson concluded.No, people who object to “religious liberty” being used as a battering ram against LGBT people are doing so because it is precisely that: It uses faith to blanket-justify discrimination. It uses faith to exclude and demean people. “Religious liberty” is an abuse of good faith.On the same day, in his fifth column in two days about Buttigieg, Erickson wrote in response to a religion-based inquiry from my colleague Scott Bixby (who went on to write this piece): “Buttigieg attacks the President for not governing as a moral person on one hand and on the other claims we cannot govern morally when it comes to abortion. He has married another man, which runs contrary to scripture, and he not only thinks it is not sin, but thinks God made him that way, all of which is contrary to Christian orthodoxy.”Again, all that Erickson has are mythical Bible passages—there are none about marriage equality—and poisonous, personal insults about Buttigieg’s sexuality and beliefs. Cheap, ungodly insults at that.“Opposition to Buttigieg should not be about his religion or his sexuality,” Erickson wrote (how kind and reasonable—even though that is what he had been relentlessly invoking himself!), “but should be because he masks his far left positions behind a smile.”Another spurious insult. Of all the candidates, Buttigieg, whether you agree with him or not, states his views with sober clarity.On July 27, Erickson tweeted a video clip and article from The Hill, in which Buttigieg opined, utterly calmly: “My generation saw this country elect its first black president and then turn around and elect a racist to the White House and we ought to call that what it is.”Erickson’s tweet read: “Notice how Butter Judge is getting more heated in his rhetoric as he starts getting left behind in the polls.” There is nothing “heated” about Buttigieg’s delivery in the clip; quite the opposite.For many years, and now in the Trump administration with Pence at their vanguard, evangelical Christians have sought to influence anti-LGBT law-making. The Trump administration has, as The Daily Beast has reported, been very receptive to them—President Trump wants the evangelical vote, and for him LGBT people and rights are necessary casualties in securing it.Trump and Pence are fully signed up to the “religious liberty” agenda, which seeks to deny LGBT rights and equality via the weird notion that by according LGBT people equal access in the buying of wedding cakes and other goods and services, this somehow counts as persecution against anti-LGBT Christians who should have every right—by dint of their faith—to discriminate against LGBT people.What seems to upset Erickson and his ilk is that a gay man of faith is calling them out on these hypocritical perversions of faith. And Buttigieg is using his own faith and his beliefs to call them out. Rarely are religious bigots challenged so squarely on their own turf by someone they’re usually so comfortable in condemning. If they bothered listening to Buttigieg, they would realize that he—with an impressive amount of patience and open-heartedness, given the bigotry he has faced from the likes of Erickson—was reminding them what the true meaning of faith and Christianity is.Possibly, this is the first salvo in a wider Republican Party return to the old dirty playbook of using someone’s sexuality against them. But sadly for Erickson and Co., Buttigieg is open not just about who he is but also who he loves. Indeed this openness has been questioned by some LGBT people, who have wondered if Buttigieg is “gay enough.” Perhaps those critics of Buttigieg, when they read the words of authors like Erickson, will realize that now is not the time to fight over slices of liberal-piety cake. The more immediate bogeyman is, sadly, an old and all-too-familiar one: pure and simple prejudice. Pete Buttigieg is the target of those who seek to hurt people, to diminish them, to encourage people not to vote for them, because they are gay. That’s it. This hoary, dusty relic is one apparently we must confront again. You may not want to vote for Buttigieg, you may disagree with him about his policies, you may wish he was “gayer” on and off the debate stage. But he is also a gay man in public life having to put up with crude, homophobic attacks. Hopefully that is “gay enough” to count as a reason to speak up for him—alongside common decency.Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[orendrasingh]

William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via GettyErick Erickson really doesn’t like that presidential primary candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg is gay, and refuses to “repent” for his sin of having gay sex.Erickson has much to say about it, an exhausting amount. For all that they profess their disgust about it, isn’t it strange, the amount of time anti-gay folks like to spend obsessing about the sex gay people have?The conservative blogger, radio host, and former CNN commentator was back on his anti-gay, anti-Buttigieg crusade again Wednesday in a column on his blog Resurgent, where he also made the startling claim that Buttigieg has less humility than that well-known trepidatious wallflower President Trump.Why Does Anyone Take Erick Erickson Seriously?Noting that Trump “has said more than once he has never felt the need to repent for anything,” and why this should lead evangelicals to question their cheering “everything he does,” Erickson added: “Pete Buttigieg is a practicing homosexual who willfully refuses to recognize Holy Scripture identifies that as a sin.”On Friday, Erickson will be joined by Vice President Mike Pence on stage at the Resurgent Gathering in Atlanta, for a conversation “about the Trump administration’s policies and plans for a second term.” Whether Buttigieg and LGBT-related matters will be raised remains to be seen.According to my colleague Adam Rawnsley, Erickson has written at least 19 tweets referencing Buttigieg since April—it’s hard to tell how many precisely because he has deleted his recent Twitter history. On Resurgent Erickson has written six times about Buttigieg since April, with five columns written on April 8 and April 9, and the sixth this week. (He has written about Joe Biden seven times.)The tweets, columns, and condemnation suggest Erickson is truly vexed not just by Buttigieg and his sexuality, but also furious that he invokes his own faith when challenging Trump and his supporters.Buttigieg’s resonant faith message is to remind fellow Christians what the meaning of that faith is in terms of their duty to treat fellow humans decently. What really rankles Erickson, and others like him, is that it is a gay man doing the truth-telling. When it comes to homosexuality, evangelical Christians like Erickson hate gay sex (which they seem bizarrely focused on), and like the sinner to know their place. Buttigieg is a total mind-scramble for them: out, proud, partnered, married, and using his own Christian faith to call out faith-based prejudice, and to question evangelicals’ support of Trump.This week, Erickson said Trump was different from Buttigieg in that he “does not lecture Christians about their faith and Buttigieg has made it a central part of his campaign.”Erickson also tweeted about it, in case we hadn’t heard: “Trump has said he has never felt the need to repent. Buttigieg doesn’t feel the need to repent of his sexual sins. Between them, only Trump possesses the humility to not lecture Christians about their faith given his unrepentant state.”Erickson also linked to a clip from the first Democratic debate this week, where Buttigieg said: “The minimum wage is just too low. And so-called conservative Christian senators right now in the Senate are blocking a bill to raise the minimum wage when scripture says that ‘Whoever oppresses the poor taunts their maker.’”Cue more Erickson pique: “Hey Mayor Pete, you know what else scripture says?” he tweeted. If this wasn’t yet another tired yowl about sinful gay sex, maybe Erickson could enlighten us otherwise.The April flurry of homophobic spite came after Buttigieg had spoken about the anti-LGBT Pence: “If me being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade. And that’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand: that if you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me—your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”Buttigieg had also queried evangelicals’ support of the president. “It’s something that really frustrates me because the hypocrisy is unbelievable,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press on April 7. “Here you have somebody who not only acts in a way that is not consistent with anything that I hear in scripture in church.”On April 8, all this seems to have made Erickson’s head start spinning wildly. He accused Buttigieg of hypocrisy, because apparently as a gay man, he had no business lecturing anyone else about Christian anything. Or as Erickson put it: “Buttigieg wants to use the social obligations as Christians against the President, but wants to avoid any implication on the personal obligations of Christians in terms of clear Biblical sexual ethics.” On the same day, under the drily disingenuous headline,“I Actually Wasn’t Going To Say This Because I’ve Offended Enough People Today, But…”, Erickson opined: “No sin is immutable. Buttigieg has decided his sin is and, in trying to reconcile his faith to his sexuality, has departed from orthodoxy in determining his sin is therefore not sin despite the very plain and clear teachings of scripture.” And then, in a third column in one day, he puzzlingly accused Buttigieg of “trying to have it both ways” around abortion, and refugees, and the poor.On the same day—April 8 seems to have been a really big bad gay day in Erickson-ville, our embattled protagonist buffeted by rainbow flags—in a now-deleted tweet, Erickson began defending poor defenseless Pence. “Mike Pence has said nothing about Buttigieg. Pence lives rent free in the man’s head. His willingness to use Pence as the basis for his unprovoked attacks on orthodox Christianity suggests Buttigieg is not really the Christian he claims to be.”Mike Pence’s animus towards LGBT people is well-documented. Buttigieg wasn’t attacking his faith; he was questioning Pence’s use of that faith to rationalize prejudice and enact harmful laws against LGBT people. In his anti-LGBT prejudice, Pence, Buttigieg said, was also challenging God.Erickson wasn’t done that day. “I mean if Buttigieg thinks evangelicals should be supporting him instead of Trump, he fundamentally does not understand the roots of Christianity. But then he is an Episcopalian, so he might not actually understand Christianity more than superficially.”For Erickson, being Episcopalian seems to count as Christianity lite, and as such is another useful weapon to attack Buttigieg with.When Buttigieg said, “The Vice President is entitled to his religious beliefs. My problem is when those religious beliefs are used as an excuse to harm other people,” Erickson responded via Twitter: “Declining to bake a cake for a wedding isn’t harming anyone, particularly when the business will bake the same person anything else.” On that basis, presumably, Erickson would be fine about cake shops, hotels, whoever, refusing service to straight people, just because they feel like it. So, any business that wants to refuse service to Erick Erickson, go ahead—he supports your right to do so, and he’s happy to buy whatever it is he needs someplace else.On April 9, Erickson wrote a column, his fourth in two days about Buttigieg, accusing him of being intolerant about Mike Pence’s “faithful” Christianity. “Buttigieg is just another in a long line of Democrats who are willing to punish Christians for living out their faith,” Erickson concluded.No, people who object to “religious liberty” being used as a battering ram against LGBT people are doing so because it is precisely that: It uses faith to blanket-justify discrimination. It uses faith to exclude and demean people. “Religious liberty” is an abuse of good faith.On the same day, in his fifth column in two days about Buttigieg, Erickson wrote in response to a religion-based inquiry from my colleague Scott Bixby (who went on to write this piece): “Buttigieg attacks the President for not governing as a moral person on one hand and on the other claims we cannot govern morally when it comes to abortion. He has married another man, which runs contrary to scripture, and he not only thinks it is not sin, but thinks God made him that way, all of which is contrary to Christian orthodoxy.”Again, all that Erickson has are mythical Bible passages—there are none about marriage equality—and poisonous, personal insults about Buttigieg’s sexuality and beliefs. Cheap, ungodly insults at that.“Opposition to Buttigieg should not be about his religion or his sexuality,” Erickson wrote (how kind and reasonable—even though that is what he had been relentlessly invoking himself!), “but should be because he masks his far left positions behind a smile.”Another spurious insult. Of all the candidates, Buttigieg, whether you agree with him or not, states his views with sober clarity.On July 27, Erickson tweeted a video clip and article from The Hill, in which Buttigieg opined, utterly calmly: “My generation saw this country elect its first black president and then turn around and elect a racist to the White House and we ought to call that what it is.”Erickson’s tweet read: “Notice how Butter Judge is getting more heated in his rhetoric as he starts getting left behind in the polls.” There is nothing “heated” about Buttigieg’s delivery in the clip; quite the opposite.For many years, and now in the Trump administration with Pence at their vanguard, evangelical Christians have sought to influence anti-LGBT law-making. The Trump administration has, as The Daily Beast has reported, been very receptive to them—President Trump wants the evangelical vote, and for him LGBT people and rights are necessary casualties in securing it.Trump and Pence are fully signed up to the “religious liberty” agenda, which seeks to deny LGBT rights and equality via the weird notion that by according LGBT people equal access in the buying of wedding cakes and other goods and services, this somehow counts as persecution against anti-LGBT Christians who should have every right—by dint of their faith—to discriminate against LGBT people.What seems to upset Erickson and his ilk is that a gay man of faith is calling them out on these hypocritical perversions of faith. And Buttigieg is using his own faith and his beliefs to call them out. Rarely are religious bigots challenged so squarely on their own turf by someone they’re usually so comfortable in condemning. If they bothered listening to Buttigieg, they would realize that he—with an impressive amount of patience and open-heartedness, given the bigotry he has faced from the likes of Erickson—was reminding them what the true meaning of faith and Christianity is.Possibly, this is the first salvo in a wider Republican Party return to the old dirty playbook of using someone’s sexuality against them. But sadly for Erickson and Co., Buttigieg is open not just about who he is but also who he loves. Indeed this openness has been questioned by some LGBT people, who have wondered if Buttigieg is “gay enough.” Perhaps those critics of Buttigieg, when they read the words of authors like Erickson, will realize that now is not the time to fight over slices of liberal-piety cake. The more immediate bogeyman is, sadly, an old and all-too-familiar one: pure and simple prejudice. Pete Buttigieg is the target of those who seek to hurt people, to diminish them, to encourage people not to vote for them, because they are gay. That’s it. This hoary, dusty relic is one apparently we must confront again. You may not want to vote for Buttigieg, you may disagree with him about his policies, you may wish he was “gayer” on and off the debate stage. But he is also a gay man in public life having to put up with crude, homophobic attacks. Hopefully that is “gay enough” to count as a reason to speak up for him—alongside common decency.Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[nasimabbas]

William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via GettyErick Erickson really doesn’t like that presidential primary candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg is gay, and refuses to “repent” for his sin of having gay sex.Erickson has much to say about it, an exhausting amount. For all that they profess their disgust about it, isn’t it strange, the amount of time anti-gay folks like to spend obsessing about the sex gay people have?The conservative blogger, radio host, and former CNN commentator was back on his anti-gay, anti-Buttigieg crusade again Wednesday in a column on his blog Resurgent, where he also made the startling claim that Buttigieg has less humility than that well-known trepidatious wallflower President Trump.Why Does Anyone Take Erick Erickson Seriously?Noting that Trump “has said more than once he has never felt the need to repent for anything,” and why this should lead evangelicals to question their cheering “everything he does,” Erickson added: “Pete Buttigieg is a practicing homosexual who willfully refuses to recognize Holy Scripture identifies that as a sin.”On Friday, Erickson will be joined by Vice President Mike Pence on stage at the Resurgent Gathering in Atlanta, for a conversation “about the Trump administration’s policies and plans for a second term.” Whether Buttigieg and LGBT-related matters will be raised remains to be seen.According to my colleague Adam Rawnsley, Erickson has written at least 19 tweets referencing Buttigieg since April—it’s hard to tell how many precisely because he has deleted his recent Twitter history. On Resurgent Erickson has written six times about Buttigieg since April, with five columns written on April 8 and April 9, and the sixth this week. (He has written about Joe Biden seven times.)The tweets, columns, and condemnation suggest Erickson is truly vexed not just by Buttigieg and his sexuality, but also furious that he invokes his own faith when challenging Trump and his supporters.Buttigieg’s resonant faith message is to remind fellow Christians what the meaning of that faith is in terms of their duty to treat fellow humans decently. What really rankles Erickson, and others like him, is that it is a gay man doing the truth-telling. When it comes to homosexuality, evangelical Christians like Erickson hate gay sex (which they seem bizarrely focused on), and like the sinner to know their place. Buttigieg is a total mind-scramble for them: out, proud, partnered, married, and using his own Christian faith to call out faith-based prejudice, and to question evangelicals’ support of Trump.This week, Erickson said Trump was different from Buttigieg in that he “does not lecture Christians about their faith and Buttigieg has made it a central part of his campaign.”Erickson also tweeted about it, in case we hadn’t heard: “Trump has said he has never felt the need to repent. Buttigieg doesn’t feel the need to repent of his sexual sins. Between them, only Trump possesses the humility to not lecture Christians about their faith given his unrepentant state.”Erickson also linked to a clip from the first Democratic debate this week, where Buttigieg said: “The minimum wage is just too low. And so-called conservative Christian senators right now in the Senate are blocking a bill to raise the minimum wage when scripture says that ‘Whoever oppresses the poor taunts their maker.’”Cue more Erickson pique: “Hey Mayor Pete, you know what else scripture says?” he tweeted. If this wasn’t yet another tired yowl about sinful gay sex, maybe Erickson could enlighten us otherwise.The April flurry of homophobic spite came after Buttigieg had spoken about the anti-LGBT Pence: “If me being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade. And that’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand: that if you got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me—your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”Buttigieg had also queried evangelicals’ support of the president. “It’s something that really frustrates me because the hypocrisy is unbelievable,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press on April 7. “Here you have somebody who not only acts in a way that is not consistent with anything that I hear in scripture in church.”On April 8, all this seems to have made Erickson’s head start spinning wildly. He accused Buttigieg of hypocrisy, because apparently as a gay man, he had no business lecturing anyone else about Christian anything. Or as Erickson put it: “Buttigieg wants to use the social obligations as Christians against the President, but wants to avoid any implication on the personal obligations of Christians in terms of clear Biblical sexual ethics.” On the same day, under the drily disingenuous headline,“I Actually Wasn’t Going To Say This Because I’ve Offended Enough People Today, But…”, Erickson opined: “No sin is immutable. Buttigieg has decided his sin is and, in trying to reconcile his faith to his sexuality, has departed from orthodoxy in determining his sin is therefore not sin despite the very plain and clear teachings of scripture.” And then, in a third column in one day, he puzzlingly accused Buttigieg of “trying to have it both ways” around abortion, and refugees, and the poor.On the same day—April 8 seems to have been a really big bad gay day in Erickson-ville, our embattled protagonist buffeted by rainbow flags—in a now-deleted tweet, Erickson began defending poor defenseless Pence. “Mike Pence has said nothing about Buttigieg. Pence lives rent free in the man’s head. His willingness to use Pence as the basis for his unprovoked attacks on orthodox Christianity suggests Buttigieg is not really the Christian he claims to be.”Mike Pence’s animus towards LGBT people is well-documented. Buttigieg wasn’t attacking his faith; he was questioning Pence’s use of that faith to rationalize prejudice and enact harmful laws against LGBT people. In his anti-LGBT prejudice, Pence, Buttigieg said, was also challenging God.Erickson wasn’t done that day. “I mean if Buttigieg thinks evangelicals should be supporting him instead of Trump, he fundamentally does not understand the roots of Christianity. But then he is an Episcopalian, so he might not actually understand Christianity more than superficially.”For Erickson, being Episcopalian seems to count as Christianity lite, and as such is another useful weapon to attack Buttigieg with.When Buttigieg said, “The Vice President is entitled to his religious beliefs. My problem is when those religious beliefs are used as an excuse to harm other people,” Erickson responded via Twitter: “Declining to bake a cake for a wedding isn’t harming anyone, particularly when the business will bake the same person anything else.” On that basis, presumably, Erickson would be fine about cake shops, hotels, whoever, refusing service to straight people, just because they feel like it. So, any business that wants to refuse service to Erick Erickson, go ahead—he supports your right to do so, and he’s happy to buy whatever it is he needs someplace else.On April 9, Erickson wrote a column, his fourth in two days about Buttigieg, accusing him of being intolerant about Mike Pence’s “faithful” Christianity. “Buttigieg is just another in a long line of Democrats who are willing to punish Christians for living out their faith,” Erickson concluded.No, people who object to “religious liberty” being used as a battering ram against LGBT people are doing so because it is precisely that: It uses faith to blanket-justify discrimination. It uses faith to exclude and demean people. “Religious liberty” is an abuse of good faith.On the same day, in his fifth column in two days about Buttigieg, Erickson wrote in response to a religion-based inquiry from my colleague Scott Bixby (who went on to write this piece): “Buttigieg attacks the President for not governing as a moral person on one hand and on the other claims we cannot govern morally when it comes to abortion. He has married another man, which runs contrary to scripture, and he not only thinks it is not sin, but thinks God made him that way, all of which is contrary to Christian orthodoxy.”Again, all that Erickson has are mythical Bible passages—there are none about marriage equality—and poisonous, personal insults about Buttigieg’s sexuality and beliefs. Cheap, ungodly insults at that.“Opposition to Buttigieg should not be about his religion or his sexuality,” Erickson wrote (how kind and reasonable—even though that is what he had been relentlessly invoking himself!), “but should be because he masks his far left positions behind a smile.”Another spurious insult. Of all the candidates, Buttigieg, whether you agree with him or not, states his views with sober clarity.On July 27, Erickson tweeted a video clip and article from The Hill, in which Buttigieg opined, utterly calmly: “My generation saw this country elect its first black president and then turn around and elect a racist to the White House and we ought to call that what it is.”Erickson’s tweet read: “Notice how Butter Judge is getting more heated in his rhetoric as he starts getting left behind in the polls.” There is nothing “heated” about Buttigieg’s delivery in the clip; quite the opposite.For many years, and now in the Trump administration with Pence at their vanguard, evangelical Christians have sought to influence anti-LGBT law-making. The Trump administration has, as The Daily Beast has reported, been very receptive to them—President Trump wants the evangelical vote, and for him LGBT people and rights are necessary casualties in securing it.Trump and Pence are fully signed up to the “religious liberty” agenda, which seeks to deny LGBT rights and equality via the weird notion that by according LGBT people equal access in the buying of wedding cakes and other goods and services, this somehow counts as persecution against anti-LGBT Christians who should have every right—by dint of their faith—to discriminate against LGBT people.What seems to upset Erickson and his ilk is that a gay man of faith is calling them out on these hypocritical perversions of faith. And Buttigieg is using his own faith and his beliefs to call them out. Rarely are religious bigots challenged so squarely on their own turf by someone they’re usually so comfortable in condemning. If they bothered listening to Buttigieg, they would realize that he—with an impressive amount of patience and open-heartedness, given the bigotry he has faced from the likes of Erickson—was reminding them what the true meaning of faith and Christianity is.Possibly, this is the first salvo in a wider Republican Party return to the old dirty playbook of using someone’s sexuality against them. But sadly for Erickson and Co., Buttigieg is open not just about who he is but also who he loves. Indeed this openness has been questioned by some LGBT people, who have wondered if Buttigieg is “gay enough.” Perhaps those critics of Buttigieg, when they read the words of authors like Erickson, will realize that now is not the time to fight over slices of liberal-piety cake. The more immediate bogeyman is, sadly, an old and all-too-familiar one: pure and simple prejudice. Pete Buttigieg is the target of those who seek to hurt people, to diminish them, to encourage people not to vote for them, because they are gay. That’s it. This hoary, dusty relic is one apparently we must confront again. You may not want to vote for Buttigieg, you may disagree with him about his policies, you may wish he was “gayer” on and off the debate stage. But he is also a gay man in public life having to put up with crude, homophobic attacks. Hopefully that is “gay enough” to count as a reason to speak up for him—alongside common decency.Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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