Oh Matt Barber. The host of the “Faith and Freedom” radio program (one can only assume they mean the freedom to marry only a person of whom the Liberty Counsel approves) took to the airwaves to say that gay people know they’re being self-destructive. Here’s the vid:

“God has written his laws on the hearts of every man, woman, and child,” Barber said. “Every individual engaged in the homosexual lifestyle, who has adopted a homosexual identity, they know intuitively that what they are doing is immoral, unnatural, and self-destructive. Yet they thirst for that affirmation because they’ve tied their whole identity up in this sexual perversion.”

Huh. I figured gay people just knew which set of genitals looked delicious to them, same as the rest of us. I had no idea gay people all knew going down on a person, same as a member of the opposite sex, suddenly became self-destructive when they did it. It seems implausible, but Barber is speaking for god so who could question that?

This is yet another argument where you could go back in time 50+ years by replacing “homosexual lifestyle” and “homosexual identity” with “interracial marriage”. The argument then was that the racist could delve into the head of someone who claimed to be pursuing a cause out of fairness and determine that the true motivation was far more sinister. The argument hasn’t aged well, and it works no better for Matt Barber and his ilk.

And does this apply to LGBT allies? Because I’m straight as an arrow, yet I think gay marriage is a moral necessity in any compassionate society. Or is it just gay people who know that that abiding by their natural impulses is unnatural?

Later in the show Barber had Peter Labarbera on. Labarbera is the president of the ironically named Americans for Truth About Homosexuality. They are surely Americans, but the irony comes when they depart from the conclusions of every major medical and psychological organization and call it “truth”. Anyway, Labarbera thinks we ought to pay more attention to ex-gays. Hey, I know! Maybe they could hold an ex-gay rally at the steps of Congress! That’s sure to be an event for the ages…