The Christian Right vilifies homosexuality to an exceptional degree. It's not imply that Christians disagree with certain aspects of gay rights or regard homosexuality as a sin - that wouldn't explain why the invest homosexuality and gay rights with the responsibility for all that is wrong with America.

Russell Shorto writes:

During last year's election campaign, at the same time that he was calling for a federal constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage, President Bush was giving a moderate sheen to the position of the conservative Christians with whom he is closely allied. As he said in his final debate with John Kerry, responding to a question about homosexuality: ''I do know that we have a choice to make in America and that is to treat people with tolerance and respect and dignity. It's important that we do that. And I also know in a free society, consenting adults can live the way they want to live. And that's to be honored.''

But for the anti-gay-marriage activists, homosexuality is something to be fought, not tolerated or respected. I found no one among the people on the ground who are leading the anti-gay-marriage cause who said in essence: ''I have nothing against homosexuality. I just don't believe gays should be allowed to marry.'' Rather, their passion comes from their conviction that homosexuality is a sin, is immoral, harms children and spreads disease. Not only that, but they see homosexuality itself as a kind of disease, one that afflicts not only individuals but also society at large and that shares one of the prominent features of a disease: it seeks to spread itself. [The New York Times]

Anti-gay activists say that they don't hate gays, they just hate the gay "lifestyle."

''Lifestyle'' is a buzzword in conservative Christian circles. It's a signal of the belief, and the policy position, that homosexuality is not an innate condition but a hedonistic way of living, one devoted to partying, drugs and wanton sex that ends, often, in illness and early death. In 2004 the Family Research Council put out a book called ''Getting It Straight: What the Research Shows About Homosexuality,'' which purports to explode the myth that homosexuality is natural or genetic and puts forth an alternative theory that it springs from childhood abuse or other developmental factors. Chapter 4, ''Is Homosexuality a Health Risk?'' lines up studies and statistics to link homosexuality with cancer, alcoholism, mental illness, suicide and reduced life span, in addition to H.I.V./AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The activists opposing gay marriage echo these points. ''My concern is the health issue,'' said Evalena Gray, an activist in southern Maryland. ''I want to get these people away from AIDS, out of that unhealthy lifestyle.''

For [Christian activists], the issue isn't one of civil rights, because the term implies something inherent in the individual -- being black, say, or a woman -- and they deny that homosexuality is inherent. It can't be, because that would mean God had created some people who are damned from birth, morally blackened. This really is the inescapable root of the whole issue, the key to understanding those working against gay marriage as well as the engine driving their vehicle in the larger culture war: the commitment, on the part of a growing number of people, to a variety of religious belief that is so thoroughgoing it permeates every facet of life and thought, that rejects the secular, pluralistic grounding of society and that answers all questions internally.

I wonder if these Christian activists realize that if a "lifestyle" excludes civil rights, then their own religious liberties are in danger. Then again, maybe only others' religious liberties are in danger. Andrew Sullivan notices the strong similarity between anti-gay rhetoric and anti-Semitic rhetoric:

They are now using arguments about gays - that they are diseased, and spread literal and figurative poison throughout society - that were once echoed almost exactly by the most vicious anti-Semites against Jews...

The danger of the Jews/Gays spreading their disease throughout society, their enormous power despite tiny numbers, their ability to pass, their threat to children, their flaunting of their disagreement with the New Testament. It's all so familiar. I think the arguments now made by some Christianists are replicas of the old anti-Semitism, peddled by so many Christians in the past: that Jews are to be loved, but loving them is dependent on their conversion to Christianity; that you can love individual Jews while disdaining Judaism; that Jews' stubbornness in resisting conversion is evidence of their inherent evil; that such evil, at some point, has to be segregated from mainstream society as much as possible. Gays are not the new blacks. They're the new Jews.

It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that a recent anti-gay-marriage rally in Poland was led by an organization that apparently has strong anti-Semitic ties. It also shouldn't be a surprise that WorldNet Daily reported favorably on the rally without a hint of criticism of the main group's anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism in Europe was, in it's modern secular guise, hatred-by-proxy. The Jews were simply made to be the scapegoats for the fears and problems of members of the extreme right. Even something like the 'Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion' which appears to complain about what the Jews are doing is in fact a litany of what people feared most about the modern world.

Digby writes:

Gays have become the all purpose repository for American bigotry --- and we have a whole lot of it that needs a place to go. Without being able to use race or religion to assuage their soulless sense of insecurity, racists have found the only group that they feel they are still allowed to openly treat like animals. Gay bashing is the new code for all our lovely homegrown hatreds --- and some European imports like anti-semitism too.

Compare this to what Stephen Eric Bronner writes in A Rumor About the Jews: Reflections on Antisemitism and the 'Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion':

The Protocols solidifies the connection between the true believers in Christianity, those nineteenth-century reactionaries intent on combating the Enlightenment, and the fanatics of a seemingly antireligious and revolutionary Nazi movement desirous of establishing the primacy of a single race. Christian institutions and the first genuinely reactionary movements, no less than the Nazis, overwhelmingly aligned themselves against the modern ideas and values generated in the age of democratic revolution: secularism and science, rationalism and materialism, tolerance and equality, capitalism and socialism, liberalism and marxism. Antisemitism was never simply an independent impulse. It was always part of a broader project directed against the civilizing impulse of reason and the dominant forces of modernity.

Today, antisemitism is much less fashionable or acceptable among many in the far-right, but their fears about modernity have not lessened. They continue to oppose any "secular, pluralistic grounding of society." They continue to fight against the Enlightenment and modernity. This means that they require a new scapegoat, at least for their more public complaints.

At various times the role of scapegoat has been filled by communists, liberals, and secular humanists. Right now, though, it appears that the Christian Right is investing most of their vitriol against modernity with gays.

Read More:

• Religious Right
• Christian Extremism
• Gay Rights, Gay Marriage
• Evangelical Christianity & Homosexuality
• Catholicism & Homosexuality