[ItsTheSheppy]

What I think we're seeing here, with the sudden in-your-face nature of hardline religiosity in this country, especially when it comes to the homophobic stuff, is the terminal insecurity of the religious establishment. The ranks of the nonreligious (not to be confused with atheists; these are just people who claim to have no religion) have been swelling so fast that one writer, whose name escapes me, declared the nonreligious as 'the fastest-growing religion in America'.

The gentle-jesus-meek-and-mild moderates tend not to care, but for those to whom this stuff is the nectar of life, that is very scary. More and more, people are realizing that the dogmatically religious, who have more or less controlled society since time immemorial, are assailable. The religious establishment is realizing how tenuous their grip is and they are fighting back in the mad, backed-into-a-corner flailing you see here.

Hardline religion is Tony Montana, standing on the balcony screaming "I'm the king! you can't kill me! I'm the best!" even as bullets tear him apart.

They don't really have any other recourse. There's no real solid evidence they can provide that a) their god claims are legit, or b) that there is, in fact, anything wrong with homosexuals. So they just start swinging for the fences, because they don't seem to have much hope in winning the long game; the zeitgeist is leaving them behind and damned if they won't cause a ruckus while they still have a chance to be relevant.

In my opinion, the best recourse to stuff like that is bemused silence. They need to understand that statements like that simply have no place in this world. He should garner the same attention he would if he were declaring ******* to be a menace because they put hexes on people, or demanding that people suspect old ladies who live alone with a lot of cats to be practitioners of witchcraft. It's just mad babbling from a bygone era, and deserves only crickets and nervous, distant coughs as answer.