Many right-wing politicians and pundits are still in denial that the Emmanuel AME church massacre was about racial hatred, despite the statements of witnesses and the shooter’s own manifesto.

Take, for example, Alan Keyes, who told Newsmax host Steve Malzberg yesterday that he does not believe that the shooting was racially motivated but was actually an incident of pro-gay, anti-Christian violence. Keyes, a Republican politician and conservative activist, said that he has personally experienced more animosity due to his religious beliefs than to his race, so concluded that the massacre must have been caused by religious hostility and thus is the latest example of the supposed “persecution” of Christians in America.

He said that the “storyline” focusing on the racial component of the Charleston shooting was “fabricated without much regard for the facts,” dismissing people who seek to “play the race card” and “play games with race” in wake of the shooting. Keyes then suggested that Dylann Roof, the shooter who left behind an extensive white supremacist manifesto, might actually have been committing a terrorist act on behalf of gay rights.

President Obama and people who want to “satisfy this or that sense of themselves and their sexual passions” created an anti-Christian climate which may have inspired the shooter, Keyes said, speculating that Roof may have been trying to “intimidate” people who oppose “the destruction of traditional marriage.”

E.W. Jackson, a Religious Right activist and Fox News contributor, similarly linked gay people and Obama to the shooting.