Thank you for posting this, Scott.

As the polarization of US society increases the role of religious cults as an organizing center for rightist and ultra rightist politics will increase. They already form a mass base that both centrist parties pander to and take quite seriously. Bush had Rove and Obama has Dubois.

We have to go on the offensive with these rightists and criticize them for their politics. Who really cares what variety of bizarre superstitions they embrace, it’s their politics that count.

We should advocate taxing them and fining them to pay compensation to victims of abuse.

We need to raise the question of cult schools including bigotry in their curriculum. First we want to close christist schools that use torture and abuse, including sexual abuse, to ‘cure’ young GLBT folks of their genetic heritage. The staff and the parents of young people thrown into these snakepits should be charged with child abuse. Second we should demand that no schools (or cults) be allowed to teach or preach that GLBT folks are sinners, that we should be subjected to ‘tough love’ or that we should be denied our civil rights. This is not a free speech issue it’s an issue of helping to prevent violence by bigoted thugs.

We should recognize that many straight cult members support us and that many from our communities are in cults. But we also have to remember that our straight cult ‘friends’ can be very fickle. In pre-Nazi Germany christists flirted with Magnus Hirschfelds Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and it’s openly gay offshoots but when the Nazi’s came to power it took them all of ten seconds to return to the fold of centuries of traditional christer homophobia and anti-Semitism.

There were exceptions, a handful of courageous catholic clergy and a few protestants like Bonhoeffer and Niemoeller but the vast majority of German christian clergy were Nazi sympathizers until May 1945 when an epidemic of amnesia struck German clerics. They conveniently forgot that their support for Hitler led to the murder of the disabled, the murder of thousands of Polish priests by German soldiers and the violent suppression of unions. And they forgot all about the holocaust and mass murder of GLBT folk.

For GLBT folks who are in cults our attitude should be supportive. Very few cults and cultists treat us like humans and many of them grew up into cults and have to sit and listen to bigoted drivel all the time. It never hurts to point out that religion is at best an unhealthy concoction of ideas that often skirt the edges of sanity. Sky Pixies, End Times, Thunder Gods, tithing, telling altar boys that jebuz also asked children to sit on his lap: it’s all pretty incredible and bizarre. Cults have caused terrible damage throughout history and religion has been accurately described as humankinds worst self-inflicted wound.

Bravo! Bravo!

That video should be required viewing for every religious right nutjob in the country. Period.

Thank you for posting this here. I've had this posted in my own blog for a while, and this provides some excellent examples for comparison.

Wow, Scott, that is an incredibly powerful video. The narrative is well spoken and hard-hitting, and the images...well, it proves that one picture really CAN be worth a thousand words.

Thanks for posting this!!

Eshto, are you trolling? You're criticizing this for pronunciation?! You've got to be kidding--or trolling.