The War Between the States is Why We Have Gay Marriage

From the 16th Arkansas Infantry site.

Via Right Wing Watch, I see that former Constitution Party Presidential Candidate and Bible-Jackhammerer Michael Peroutka was on Steve Deace's radio show propaganda catapult again, this time to tell us that Lincoln freed the gays!

Part the first: God!

But what we really need is a dose of reality, what we need to do is wave reality over this situation and go back to what God called marriage, not what the state has perverted the definition to be but what God called marriage. That’s what we need to return to. There is no way we are ever going to validate homo or sodomite-marriage because God defined marriage as between a man and a woman once and forever.

Apparently, Peroutka doesn't read KTW, or he'd know that he might not care for the Biblical definition of marriage. Or maybe he would; the whole slaves-have-to-marry-their-masters thing might just work for him, since the Human Rights Campaign called Per­outka an “active white supremacist and secessionist sympathizer.”

Part the second: More Power!

"...there have been a number of watershed events in American history that have taken us away from this view that I’m describing, this American view. One of them was ‘The War Between the States.’ Ever since then there’s been this huge black hole of centralized power that’s formed in Washington D.C. People sometimes talk about ‘The War Between the States’ as being about the issue of slavery, I believe that history is written by the winners, it wasn’t about that at all. What it was about was consolidating power into the hands of a few people."

Like most wingnuts, the "hands of a few people" he's blabbing about are the 435 voting members of the House of Representatives, the 100 US Senators (where, in theory, 11.3% of the 50-state population could stop any bill from becoming law), the nine Supreme Court members, and the President. So, Peroutka's "hands of a few people" that the civil war gave so much power to is really 545 people.

But we already knew wingnuts have trouble with math. Physics, too, seems to be a problem, since a "black hole of centralized power" would be where centralized power gets sucked out of existence. But then, this guy probably thinks the earth is 6000 years old, so...

Civil War Monumnet, Cherry Valley, NY, photo by Robin Supak

Like most confederate apologists, Peroutka is trying to spread misinformation about the Civil War. I've even seen this kind of bullshitting rewrite of history up here in "Upper Appalachia" where wingnuts in trucks with Confederate flag stickers flip off the monument to the Union dead as they drive by. I love to keep wingnuts talking, of course, but we must be sure to always challenge this particularly vile lie.

The best way I've ever seen to debunk this I learned from Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has famously said that the Civil War isn't tragic. It's something to celebrate, because it was a successful battle in the centuries long war on black people.  If you find it necessary to explain this obvious point, point the bullshitters to the Cornerstone Speech by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, and maybe it'll get through their thick skulls:

The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell." 

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.

I hope Michael Peroutka keeps talking, so we can all hear how the Civil War is why we can't return to Biblical Marriage, where raped virgins have to marry their rapists, soldiers can marry the widows of the man they just killed, men can have multiple wives, masters can marry slaves, etc. Maybe more people will start to realize that the Civil War wasn't tragic.