Here we go again, with Republicans accusing us of being them. I noticed a good ten years ago or so something odd about Republicans. They would do something nasty, and then turn around and accuse Democrats of doing it first – when we were doing nothing of the kind. A reader pointed out to me a while back that this, in poker, is called a “tell.” It’s like a subconscious tic that gives away what the person is really thinking.

Well, the latest nervous tic to cross our radar is from none other than discredited former conservative Republican leader Newt Gingrich. Newt thinks gay people are fascists and are hell bent on taking over the world. (Methinks Newt still may have some unresolved issues from having a lesbian sister. Lord knows she must have some issues having a neanderthal brother.) Well, Newt now thinks gays are fascists – he used the word – because they are publicly holding rallies to oppose the passage of Prop 8 in California. You’ll recall that Prop 8 was the proposition that the Mormons and the religious right used to overturn a civil rights decision of the California Supreme Court, ripping the right of marriage away from gay couples.

Here’s Newt:

Discussing actions by individual protesters of Proposition 8, Newt Gingrich stated: “I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion.”

So let’s revisit. You’re apparently not a fascist if you use the frenzied anger of the majority to get the government to take away the judicially-recognized civil rights of a discriminated-against minority, but you are a fascist if you’re a member of the powerless minority who exercises their Democratic right to publicly rally and exercise free speech.

But it makes sense, if you think of the poker “tell.” If you were a member of a political party that believed that the only “real” Americans were southern, white, conservative, Baptist men (sorry, Mormons), then it would make sense to use the mindless popular will of the majority to take rights away from the minority. And when the minority tried to stand up to defend itself, knowing that the minority is per se sub-human under this line of thinking, the minority is naturally being uppity, or the more modern phrase, “fascist.”

Gingrich is actually using a religious right trick, in which they beat up on minorities, and then when the minorities fight back the victims are accused of being “intolerant of intolerance.” The Mormons have played this card of late as well, trying to portray themselves as some sot of “victim” of “religious bigotry” after they spent $20 million ripping away the civil rights of gay men and lesbians in California in an effort to jam Mormon values down the throats of Christians, Jews and others.

But I’m sure it’s not religious bigotry when the Mormons forcibly convert dead Holocaust victims to Mormonism against the wishes of the victims’ families. It’s only religious bigotry when Jews demand Mormons stop violating their dead. Yeah, right.