Remember the good old days when you would get up and sing a song in a bar and the people wouldn't care for it so they would drag you to the nearest tree and hang you? Kevin Swanson does, and he really, really misses those days.
Swanson hosts a radio program out of Colorado Springs called Generations with Kevin Swanson where he spouts some of the most hateful rhetoric against the LGBT community anywhere to be found. Just recently he entered the flap surrounding Nabisco's gay-positive Honey Maid ad by comparing homosexuality with being an axe murderer.
When you come down to things like axe murder or homosexuality and you say, ‘we’re really going to promote it and we’re going to encourage everybody in America to engage in this or at least support this thing,’ there will be people on the other side who will take an adamantly opposed position to your support of axe murdering or homosexuality.
He's a real charmer, this one.
On April 6, singer Kacey Musgraves won Album of the Year at the 2014 American Country Music Awards for her debut album Same Trailer Different Park. Although I'm not a huge fan of the genre, I have to admit that I love the hit song from her album, Follow Your Arrow. The song signals that even country music has come a very long way towards the recognition and acceptance that LGBT people exist and are just as deserving of happiness as anyone else.
This is just another step too far for Swanson who went on his radio program to denounce the singer, her song, and all the axe-murdering homosexualists out there who dared benefit from its affirming message. Right Wing Watch has unearthed this latest nugget of Christian love from Swanson.
Swanson said on his April 10 radio program that if Musgraves had performed her song “Follow Your Arrow” any time between the 1880s and the 1960s, it would have prompted calls for her to be killed: “Let me say this, if she had sang [sic] that thing in a country bar in the 1920s or 1880s in Denver, Colorado, somebody would’ve called for a rope, ‘Get a rope!’ You know what would have happened, she would not have made it out of town in the 1880s, 1920s, 1940s or 1960s.”
“But things have changed, friends,” he lamented.
“When you can turn a once-Christian nation into Sodom, that’s when the demons do their celebration, their dance in the end zone,” he said. “So she’s got to promote homosexuality and she’s got to promote the abandonment of the traditional church in the same song. That’s critical for the dismantling of the Christian faith in the heartland.”
Emphasis mine.
In Swansonland, you don't even need to be gay yourself to deserve to swing from a tree. All you have to do is exhibit a bit of support for our rights or your own right not to buy into authoritarian Christian rhetoric for Swanson to wax nostalgic for the days when vigilantes could take matters into their own hands and murder you in cold blood. No harm, no foul, just good old-timey times.
Swanson, like so many of those on the religious right do indeed long for those days. Not many of them will speak as candidly about daydreams of arbitrary hangings as Swanson. Most of these folks are smart enough to use code and dog whistles to signal to their audience that we are less-than, not deserving rights, not deserving life.
I've been asked before why I care so much about what these crackpots say. I care because what they say has an audience and the message they send is dangerous to me and to my community. Do they have a right to their hate speech? Yes. Do they have the right not to be called out and exposed as the dangerous catalysts of hatred that they are? Absolutely not.
Thank you for reading. Now here is something to get the taste of bigotry out of your mouth. Enjoy.
Follow Your Arrow
If you save yourself for marriage
You're a bore
You don't save yourself for marriage
You're a horrible person
If you won't have a drink then you're a prude
But they'll call you a drunk
As soon as you down the first one
If you can't lose the weight
Then you're just fat
But if you lose too much
Then you're on crack
You're damned if you do
And you're damned if you don't
So, you might as well just do
Whatever you want
So, make lots of noise
Kiss lots of boys
Or kiss lots of girls
If that's something you're into
When the straight and narrow
Gets a little too straight
Roll up a joint or don't
Just follow your arrow
Wherever it points, yeah
Follow your arrow
Wherever it points
If you don't go to church, you'll go to hell
If you're the first one on the front row
You're a self-righteous son of a
Can't win for losing
You'll just disappoint 'em
Just 'cause you can't beat 'em
Don't mean you should join 'em
So, make lots of noise
Kiss lots of boys
Or kiss lots of girls
If that's something you're into
When the straight and narrow
Gets a little too straight
Roll up a joint or don't
Just follow your arrow
Wherever it points, yeah
Follow your arrow
Wherever it points
Say what you think
Love who you love
'Cause you just get so many trips around the sun
Yeah, you only, only live once
So, make lots of noise
Kiss lots of boys
Or kiss lots of girls
If that's something you're into
When the straight and narrow
Gets a little too straight
Roll up a joint or don't
Just follow your arrow
Wherever it points, yeah
Follow your arrow
Wherever it points