Conservatives are waging a war of words
against Dan Savage for calling “bullshit” on the Bible's anti-gay
message.
Savage is the editor of Seattle's The
Stranger, the founder of the It Gets Better Project and a Rick
Santorum antagonist.
A group of Christian students earlier
this month staged a walk out as Savage spoke at the National High
School Journalism Conference.
“We can learn to ignore the bullshit
about gay people in the Bible the same way we have learned to ignore
the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about
dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about
masturbation. We ignore bullshit in the Bible about all sorts of
things. The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners
waived Bibles over their heads during the civil war and justified
it.”
“If the Bible got the easiest moral
question that humanity has ever faced wrong, slavery, what are the
odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality
wrong? 100 percent.”
Afterward, Savage remarked: “You can
tell the Bible guys in the hall they can come back now because I'm
done beating up the Bible. It's funny as someone who is on the
receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how
pansy-ass some people react when you push back.” (The video is
embedded in the right panel of this page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)
In a The
Stranger blog post, Savage apologized for using the term
“pansy-ass.”: “[M]y use of 'pansy-assed' was insulting, it was
name-calling, and it was wrong. And I apologize for saying it.”
During an appearance Monday on Fox
News' Fox & Friends, Rick Tuttle, the California high
school teacher who organized the walk out, called Savage a “bully.”
“My duty is to protect all students
from bullying, and so I thought there was value in going to this
conference to hear a speech about what I thought was anti-bullying.
But what we got was a vulgar, profanity-laced attack on Christians.
And some of my students actually asked me if they could leave and I
said definitely, they could,” Tuttle said. (Watch
the segment at Mediaite.com.)
Also condemning Savage are Rick Moran
at the American
Thinker, Dave Tombers at World
Net Daily, and gay GOP group GOProud.
“So where is the @glaad statement
condemning the bullying & anti-Christian tirade of Dan Savage?
#tcot #homocon,” tweeted GOProud's Chris Barron.