Is there no greater victim than a Republican hater?

Not all Republicans. Just the most hateful ones. They seem to be the ones A) in charge, and B) who always claim to be the greatest victims.

To wit: After decades of branding gays falsely as pedophiles, and earned the official title of “hate group” for it, the religious right now demands that gays and our allies be more “civil” and stop calling them a hate group.

How about they stop acting like one first?

What’s really going on is that the religious right continues to be stung from several of its lead groups being labeled officially-designated “hate groups” in the past few years. Like most Republican bullies, the religious right bristles when any of its victims fight back. So the religious right has been on a tirade for months now, after a lone deranged guy with a gun shot a security guard at one of the group’s headquarters in the arm, that all of their lives are in massive danger because we’re mean to them.

Right.

If meanness per se led to violence we’d all be dead by now, after all the knowingly-false garbage the religious right has thrown at us for decades.

But what really takes the cake is the religious right’s ongoing “plea” of late that we return to “civil discourse.” That’s a bit – no, that’s a lot – like a rapist demanding his victim to stop having sex with him. Here are two religious right groups in the last day making the bizarre demand. A third did it a few months ago.

To continue the rape analogy, the religious right probably considers the pedophile lie “legitimate hate.”

Yeah, well, fortunately for us, the body politic has a way of shutting that down. One of them is by labeling you an official hate group, and exposing your bigotry and intolerance to sunshine.

I’ve written a lot about the GOP “tell.” It’s a poker term for an involuntary action that gives away your hand. When dealing with Republicans, their whine is their tell. It’s usually a pretty good indicator of something they themselves are doing or have done. In this case, the tell is the whine about a lack of civility. I’ve worked in politics in Washington, DC for nearly 25 years now, and the “tell” that you’re dealing with an opponent who lacks civility is when he incessantly calls you a pedophile and knows it’s a lie. It really doesn’t get more uncivil than that.

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, the organization the nut with the gun went to – and one of the officially-designated hate groups – pulled the pedophile-canard the other day on CNN. Soledad O’Brien, to her credit, was having none of it.

Perkins and his minions have trotted out the pedophile-card before. Including four days ago again on CNN. His organization has been making the groundless attack for decades. But now, suddenly, the religious right is for civility on the same day that Perkins renews the call that we’re pedophiles. Priceless.

To the religious right, defending yourself is uncivil. I’ll bet a lot of white southerners felt that way too when African-Americans finally started fighting back en masse during the Civil Rights Movement. It’s a bitch when your victim won’t just lay there.

I’ve already done a series of essays on why these groups are in fact hate groups, and hateful, and un-Christian, in addition to utterly dishonest liars. None of them have repented for their uncivil discourse, and they continue to spew it on the same day they call for our civil discourse.

I summed up the religious right’s conundrum they find themselves in, with respect to claiming that they’re a “target” because their victims, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, have finally stood up to them and called them out for their sins: