Somehow, Charles Worley, the pastor who wants to put all gay people inside of electrified fences, has followers.

One of them, Stacey Pritchard, attempted to defend her pastor’s comments on CNN last night. Anderson Cooper threw her softball after softball and she completely whiffed on every single one of them. This is seriously mind-boggling to listen to:

Blogger John Shore has a very calm-but-frustrated take on the whole video. He tries really hard to understand where people like her are coming from…

I’m not saying this pretty woman is stupid; she doesn’t seem particularly organically stupid at all. But that’s she’s pretty dramatically uneducated is painfully obvious. She seems to have almost no capacity for the most elemental kind of reasoning — the kind of reasoning that is the first and primary benefit of even a solid elementary school education. And her anger is palpable; she positively radiates hostility. And I don’t blame her for being angry. It’s a terrible thing to even say, but the truth is that the world is generally a terribly harsh place for people who are uneducated. When you don’t know how to at all reason — not to mention when you’ve been trained to believe there’s not really much you personally can do to impact the quality of your life — your world gets real small real fast. … People like her get me itchy. They make me want to start storing food and buying weapons. And I’m not sure that here in America today we’re producing any more of any kind of person than we are people like her. I think she’s the norm these day. If not, she’s way too freakin’ close to it.

I agree — this sort of hatred against gay people is the norm. Certainly in the Christian community. They won’t all be that extreme, but the Christians who claim to “love” gay people are the same ones who want to deny them equal rights, who fight against anti-bullying legislation, who don’t even want others to bring up the word “homosexual” (because, you know, that’s how teh gey is spread).

Those Christians will be quick to denounce Pritchard, Worley, and that entire church. Meanwhile, their own pastors cloak their bigotry in less outward hate while saying virtually the same things… but they’re totally fine with that.



