Darkside Rainbow

Normally, when I think of conspiracy theorists, I think of complete mental cases with overdeveloped technical skills and underdeveloped senses of personal hygiene, crafting tinfoil hats in their mothers’ basements and swearing that the truth is out there because their X-files posters say so. What I don’t think of is Catholic bishops, although I will admit that Catholicism does have a strong track record of nutjobs - from psychotic evangelical leaders to monks raving in the belfries. So maybe it’s not so out of place when the Right Reverend Joseph Devine sounds like he’s just about ready to shave his head and start tilting at windmills when he claims that there’s a “huge and well-orchestrated conspiracy against Christian values”:

Catholic bishop hits out at ‘gay conspiracy’ to destroy Christianity - News.Scotsman.com

One of Scotland’s most senior Catholics has launched an attack on the “gay lobby” in Scotland, claiming there is a “huge and well-orchestrated conspiracy” against Christian values. The Rt Rev Joseph Devine, Bishop of Motherwell and president of the Catholic Education Commission, said gay rights organisations aligned themselves with minority groups, such as Holocaust survivors, to project an “image of a group of people under persecution”.

He warned that the gay lobby – which he labelled “the opposition” – had mounted “a giant conspiracy” to shape public policy.

[...]In the fourth of the Gonzaga Lectures held at St Aloysius’ College in Glasgow on Tuesday, Bishop Devine said: “The homosexual lobby has been extremely effective in aligning itself with minority groups.

“It is ever-present at the service each year for the Holocaust memorial, as if to create for themselves the image of a group of people under persecution. We neglect the gay movement at our peril.

“I want to ask you if you are able to see the giant conspiracy that’s taking place before our eyes, even if we didn’t see it at the time. I take it you’re beginning to see that there is a huge and well-orchestrated conspiracy taking place, which the Catholic community missed.”

He went on: “In this New Year’s honours list, I saw actor Ian McKellen being honoured for his work on behalf of homosexuals, when a century ago Oscar Wilde was locked up and put in jail. “It’s a very small group of people, but very active and organised – and extremely indulgent. The opposition know exactly what they’re doing. We don’t.”

Oh, yes. We’re quite organized. Little do you know that the conspiracy isn’t just in the UK; it’s worldwide. We have secret global bunkers where we hoard glitter, condoms, and Tori Amos albums. Fire Island is actually a militant training camp where we’re drilled in conversion techniques, subversion strategies, and the fifty ways to kill a man with a cardboard nail file. Not only that, but we have secret decoder rings that get us discounts on spiky, gelled androgynous haircuts (you know the cut - depending on the gender of the wearer, it’s either trendyfag or sportylez, but it’s the exact same cut) in every hair salon across the planet…and our uniforms are absolutely fabulous.

Done laughing yet?

Seriously, I’ll never understand conspiracy theorists. Yes, there have been some grand conspiracies throughout history, but for the most part they were only uncovered after the fact because part of what made them such successfully complex conspiracies was that they were almost entirely covert. Gay rights movements are quite out in the open, thank you, and aren’t even remotely organized enough to begin to shield a conspiracy - unless you want to believe that the disorganization and the multiple dismal failures that we’ve suffered are a deliberate attempt to hide what’s really going on.

Er. No. Frankly, I think the gay community overall is too self-centered (myself included) to mount a massive conspiracy to threaten anything, let alone Christian values. This is just one nutjob’s persecution complex (isn’t he accusing us of the same thing?); he needs to be right so much that he has to create a massive and faceless entity acting as a collective whole to actively and deliberately cause harm to his own personal beliefs. It’s rather like when people condemn “the liberal media’. There is no single-minded machine called “the liberal media”; there are multiple media entities made up of millions of people with varying motivations and directives, all bound by nationally mandated regulations that are constantly battled over by liberal and conservative entities.

The same goes for the gay rights movement; the label is just that, a label to collectively identify the one motive unifying diverse groups and individuals who cannot be collectively labeled as good or evil, and most certainly can’t be defined as promoting a conspiracy. Each person involved in the gay rights movement is concerned with their lives, their jobs, their homes, their families, just like anyone concerned with Christian values. Each person has their own individual problems, their individual successes, and their major motivating factors in life. The fact that they all happen to believe in gay equality isn’t a conspiracy. It is, as I’ve said a million times before, a basic human desire to be treated fairly.

Perhaps a few people are actively trying to undermine Christianity - but if they’re going to judge us by a minor percentage, then perhaps we should judge all Christians by Devine.

No?

I got yer tin foil right here, biotch.