In a post for HuffPost Gay Voices, Michelangelo Signorile warned that Republicans were "hiding homophobia in plain sight" by means of "pernicious" religious liberty legislation.
After characterizing the media's coverage of CPAC as "misleading" the public into thinking that "attacks on LGBT rights and even gay marriage had been purged from the event," Signorile said he saw the event from a much different perspective. The event, like "much of the conservative movement," he explained, had now "moved further into a dangerous phase," characterized by the use of religious liberty bills to legislate homophobia:
But I saw a much different CPAC. The event -- and much of the conservative movement -- has moved further into a dangerous phase, in which vilification of LGBT people is done by portraying Christians as victims of the aggressive homosexual agenda. And that, of course, is the crux of the argument promoting pernicious "religious liberty" bills in states across the country that target LGBT people. It was disappointing that much of the media didn't pick up on this at CPAC. And that's a warning that we should stop using discussion of same-sex marriage as the yardstick to measure whether people are "pro-gay," "anti-gay," or indifferent, and instruct the media to do the same. The Supreme Court will likely end the same-sex marriage issue by June, but as 90-year-old Phyllis Schlafly told me at CPAC, the Christian right crusade will hardly end.
Signorile goes on to portray the participants at CPAC as anti-gay religious zealots. Citing the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (which at one point list Ben Carson as an anti-LGBT "extremist"), Signorile describes the Family Research Institute as a "hate group" and paints Dana Loesch as a "frenz[ied]" religious nut who "frighteningly attempted to turn the 'religious liberty' argument into one that is actually defending gays":
[Quoting Loesch] "If not religious liberty, then what? This is one variable in a multi-faceted attempt for the government to grab individual rights...You don't have to be a Christian to be affected by religious liberty...They say, 'If I'm not taking up your losing rights, well, then what will happen to me when the day comes and someone comes to me? What if you're stoned for walking out in the street for being gay?'"
And with that statement she preposterously, frighteningly attempted to turn the "religious liberty" argument into one that is actually defending gays. Yet still, she painted gays as the aggressors, and Christians as the victims.
Signorile ends the piece by declaring that anyone who didn't see the same homophobia that "animates" CPAC and much of the conservative movement "must have been wearing blinders."
