American Thinker is a website that I visit from time to time. It is your typical, garden-variety right-wing site, created by and for fact-challenged people who believe that liberalism is the root of all evil, and that Jesus Christ personally hand-delivered the U.S. Constitution to the founding fathers. The one thing that sets American Thinker apart from most of its peer sites is that one of its contributing bloggers, Robert Oscar Lopez, is allegedly gay and claims to have been raised by two lesbians.
However, this is no indication of any level of gay acceptance on the part of the American Thinker readership. In fact, reading some of Mr. Lopez's blog posts reveals why he is allowed to post at all. You see, Robert Oscar Lopez is easily one of the most shamelessly self-loathing anti-gay sycophants on the planet. He despises gay marriage and gets apoplectic at the mere thought of gay couples raising children. Lopez's absurd "exposés" perpetuate the myths that fill the fantasy universe where most evangelical conservatives reside, a universe where all homosexuals are uncoupled, hypersexual and battling monsters like depression, suicide, addiction, eating disorders and sexually transmitted infections, all things that heterosexuals somehow, magically, never experience; a universe where evil "power gays" like Dan Savage and Rachel Maddow are "helicoptered in" to destroy all that is wholesome and pure by insisting that the gay community be treated equally under the law so that we can buy and sell children on the black market. Oh, the humanity! Lopez longs for the good old days when gays knew their place, stayed in the closet and, if they refused to enter into sham opposite-sex marriages, covertly provided for their futures and those of their long-term partners.
He is misery personified. He's everything right-wing extremists want a gay person to be (except for straight). Nevertheless, no matter how much Lopez tells American Thinker readers what they want to hear, no matter how much he panders to and placates them, they still can only, begrudgingly, manage to halfheartedly tolerate him, as the majority of reader comments on his posts demonstrate.
This is why I refer to Mr. Lopez as an "alleged" homosexual. It's difficult for me to accept that anyone could have such disdain for himself and the community of which he claims to be an active member. What could cause such self-hatred? Apparently, Lopez had an unpleasant childhood, which he clearly attributes to being raised in a home with no father. But isn't that subjective? Just recently we learned of the suicide of well-known and respected pastor Rick Warren's son Matthew, who was raised in a loving Christian home with both a mother and a father and still fought a lifelong battle with depression. This is in no way intended to minimize the unspeakable tragedy of this event, but it also reinforces my belief that Lopez is wrong to malign same-sex parents based on his own isolated experience. Bad things can, and do, happen in any home. Perhaps Lopez should try to convince Zach Wahls or Daniel Martinez-Leffew that their same-sex parents should forever be denied the more than 1,138 legal protections and responsibilities from the federal government that civil marriage brings, and then try to convince them that their same-sex parents have done (and are doing) them a horrible disservice by loving, supporting and wanting them. He'd probably have about as much luck as he has had trying to convince the American Thinker readership that he is not an abomination who deserves to be treated as nothing more than a second-class citizen.