Christian Pastor Kevin Swanson has a long history of making outlandish claims. He thinks the goal of public schools is to turn children into transgender Communists. He hated the live-action Beauty and the Beast movie because it promoted inter-species breeding. He’s compared gay people to Nazis and cannibals.

It’s not surprising that Republican presidential hopefuls have spoken at his conference. Because if they can’t get the support of the Christians who think Swanson makes sense, they have no hope of getting into the White House. Because that’s what our politics is like nowadays.

Anyway, Swanson’s latest rant, made on his radio show yesterday with co-host Bill Jack, was about public schools in Washington state that teach kids about gender identity. After talking about how rape is prosecuted in the state, Swanson and Jack wondered why other sexual crimes — such as teaching gender identity, I guess — were permitted.

In a more sensible time, they argued, parents would burn the schools to the ground and “stone the apostates.”

After Swanson fumed that “the worst possible abominations are accepted in the state of Washington” and that the public schools are “whorehouses,” Jack declared that “we need to burn ’em down.” Swanson and Jack agreed that if parents from the 1950s saw what was happening in the schools today, “they would want to burn them down.” “They would burn them down,” Jack said. “They would tear the bricks out of the walls, they would use the bricks to stone the apostates.”

There were a lot of parents in the 1950s who didn’t want to see schools desegregated. I’m not sure why we’re looking to them for advice on how we should act today.

Swanson and Jack are so scared of information that doesn’t comport with their fundamentalist worldview that they’d rather see schools shut down than children understand that the world is more complicated than they might learn in church. They promote a mindset of simplicity and ignorance, and any deviation from that is a problem.

It’d be so much easier to dismiss what they’re saying if people like them weren’t running the government.

(via Right Wing Watch)

