"I have a right to defend myself. And to point out the hypocrisy of people who justify anti-gay bigotry by pointing to the Bible" ~Dan Savage

I recently watched a YouTube video of Dan Savage (the guy who started the “It Gets Better Project”) speaking to a group of high school journalists and I feel that everything he said during the short excerpt which made it into the YouTube video is absolutely true! Of course there were several students who walked out during his rant, but their refusal to hear his words as he points out the hypocrisy which exists in modern day bible thumpers just further exacerbates the inequality LGBT People face. We’re constantly talked down to on the basis that it says in the bible that being gay is sin, and we listen to it, but when we point out how ridiculous that is, people refuse to hear us.

If you are a Christian who believes that same sex marriage should not be legally recognized in this country and you’ve ever worn a cotton-poly blend, or you’ve ever eaten shellfish, you are a hypocritical bigot.

I’ve posted a transcript from Dan Savage’s speech below for you to read over and think through …

“The Bible, we’ll just talk about the Bible for a second. People often point out that they can’t help it – they can’t help with the anti-gay bullying, because it says right there in Leviticus, it says right there in Timothy, it says right there in Romans, that being gay is wrong.

“We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people. The same way, 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 waved Bibles over their heads during the Civil War and justified it. The shortest book in the New Testament is a letter from Paul to a Christian slave owner about owning his Christian slave. And Paul doesn’t say “Christians don’t own people.” Paul talks about how Christians own people.

“We ignore what the Bible says about slavery, because the Bible got slavery wrong. Sam Harris, in A Letter To A Christian Nation, points out that the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong. Slavery! What’re the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong? One hundred percent.

“The Bible says that if your daughter’s not a virgin on her wedding night – if a woman isn’t a virgin on her wedding night, she shall be dragged to her father’s doorstep and stoned to death ... Callista Gingrich lives ... And there is no effort to amend state constitutions to make it legal to stone women to death on their wedding night if they’re not virgins … At least not yet ... We don’t know where the GOP is going these days.

“People are dying because people can’t clear this one last hurdle. They can’t get past this one last thing in the Bible about homosexuality.”

(By this point in his speech, several students had walked out)

“One other thing I wanna talk about is — you can tell the Bible guys in the hall that they can come back now, because I’m done beating up the Bible.

“It’s funny, as someone who’s on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how pansy-assed some people react when you push back.

“I apologize if I hurt anyone’s feelings, but I have a right to defend myself. And to point out the hypocrisy of people who justify anti-gay bigotry by pointing to the Bible, and insisting we must live by the code of Leviticus on this one issue and no other.”