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I was thinking about Glenn Beck this past week telling Pastor Mark Driscoll that his daughter was brainwashed to think he is anti-gay.

From his reaction, Beck would have you think that he is as innocent as can be and you literally won’t believe the very sincere sounding words that come out of his mouth. In true Beckian style, he has invented a Glenn Beck who can be outraged and hurt by an intolerance on the left he has invented out of whole cloth:

“There isn’t a soul that I know of that doesn’t respect peoples’ right to be of different religion. We all pretty much basically say let’s all just get along. But that’s no longer what society is saying. I don’t know what this society is because I don’t know people like that. I don’t know the bigots and the haters who want to shut you down because you believe something they don’t believe.”

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Take a listen:

Driscoll explained to Beck that his church had done a poll and discovered that intolerance was the number one objection to Christianity.

“The new definition of tolerance is you have to approve of me and endorse me, otherwise you hate me. That’s different.”

This is interesting logic, since that is exactly what Christian conservatives have been saying since the first century, cultivating an either/or mentality that has killed millions. Since 1964 the Religious Right has pushed the idea that if you do not do what they say, do not live like they want you to live, that you hate them, moreover, that you persecute them.

There’s no tolerance of my opinion,” Beck agreed. “This is the thing, my daughter went to Fordham University, which I’m glad I didn’t spend a dime on, she did it all through scholarship and I would not have paid for that education because here’s this Catholic university that taught my daughter that the Bible was nonsense and it was just a bad experience. But she thought for a while that I was intolerant,” he added. “And I kept saying to her, ‘Honey, you don’t understand. When it comes to gay marriage, for example, I have gay friends, I have gay employees, I don’t really care. What you do is what you do. You work that out. That’s your life.’ But I tried to explain to her, what this really is about is telling my church what I have to believe. You can’t force me to say that my God says you can be married or not married. You can’t force me to do that. She didn’t believe me until everything started going through, and then she started seeing the intolerance on the other side.

But his rhetoric demonstrates the opposite. You would not, for example, be surprised to hear this come out of his mouth:

That’s speculative. But this is Glenn Beck in 2009:

Media Matters goes into some depth about the extent of Beck’s anti-gay stance in an article they call “Glenn Beck’s anti-gay army of God.” The evidence is not only in Beck’s own utterances, but the guests he has entertained on his show and appeared with him at events, and they are some of the most rabidly anti-gay conservatives on the planet:

David Barton

James Dobson

Randy Forbes

Jim Garlow

John Hagee

Terence Henry

Alveda King

Richard Land

Daniel Lapin

Patrick Lee

Richard Lee

Miles McPherson

Chuck Norris

Sarah Palin

James Robison

Charles Stanley

And remember, Beck says he doesn’t know anybody like these people, yet there they are talking to him on his show or at events, spewing hate and intolerance of gays for all to hear.

There is literally not room here to go through all the evidence of Beck’s anti-gay history. Yet if you listen to Beck’s interview with Mark Deiscoll without knowledge of this history, you would think that Beck was the most unjustly persecuted man on the planet.

Clearly, if Beck’s daughter thought he was anti-gay, it was with good reason, and no fault at all of a “liberal Catholic University.” Conservatives talk a lot about accepting personal responsibility but every time they meet it face to face, they turn, run the other way, and blame somebody else. And that is exactly what Glenn Beck has done here.