Hate group leader Mat Staver

Mat Staver, founder and leader of a particularly anti-LGBT hate group that peddles itself to news outlets and politicos as Liberty Counsel, is in another greasy sweat these days.

This time it's over the Senate's anti-lynching bill, passed in December. Staver is in a snit over the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act not because it explicitly declares lynching someone to be a federal crime, but because it also criminalizes lynching someone based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. Staver, who is a six-foot-tall human penis with boundary issues, finds that detail of the bill unacceptable, and is lobbying the House to have those previsions removed.

"The old saying is once that camel gets the nose in the tent, you can't stop them from coming the rest of the way in," Staver said in an interview with conservative Christian news outlet OneNewsNow. “This is a way to slip it in under a so-called anti-lynching bill, and to then to sort of circle the wagon [sic] and then go for the juggler [sic] at some time in the future."

Because Democrats are now in charge of the House, this lobbying is far less likely to be successful than it would have been a few weeks back, but Staver is nonetheless concerned that wagoneering gay Americans will come to murder his juggler if the government makes it a federal crime for his close personal friends to hang certain Americans from trees until they are dead. Mat Staver, however, can get bent.

Staver's Liberty Counsel has engaged in this sort of sociopathic, ritualized panic against The Gays for, literally, decades. Despite his organization's SPLC designation as hate group, earned for Staver's long history of brazen falsehoods and hate speech toward LGBT Americans—along with his support of laws to criminalize homosexuality outright in other nations—he continued to have the ear of Republican leaders and a great deal of success in getting Republicans to do what he wanted because That Is What Conservatism Is Now.

In a Democratic House, however, he won't find as many open doors. And I promise you, we will hear him wail about that, and loudly, because the real purpose of most of this sort of far-right flimflammery is to squeeze the fake-Christian Fox News crowd for every last dollar. There's no easier way to do it than to shriek that The Homosexuals are coming for your juggler.