For most people on the right Peter LaBarbera is simply a fringe element tolerated yet ridiculed the way “Paulnuts” or NAU truthers are. As long as they aren’t too much of a bother, no one pays much attention to what they get up to until they do something that reflects badly on the right as a whole, but otherwise their myopic vehemence about some ultimately inconsequential cause is little more than the source of some amusement, or more correctly bemusement, by most of us on the right who don’t spend our waking days consumed with conspiracies, petty bigotry or the overwhelming fear that somewhere two men may be kissing.

Until recently the only thing I knew about LaBarbera is that Pam Spaulding, the auntie tom who sat back and laughed while White liberals on Pandagon called me a race traitor for being Bi-racial and not tongue bathing them every day, allowed a death threat against him and his family credible enough for the F.B.I. to become involved to sit in her comments section. That was a little over a year ago and I never covered it because this was frankly a case of two rank bigots with too much time on their hands and not enough compassion in their hearts running afoul of each other in that poetic way that seems to prove there is a divine hand at work that is both just and and a dry wit.

But yesterday my fellow blogger Trench Reynolds sent me a link to this Killian Melloy article about the coverage of the George Weber murder where I am mentioned. Pleased with myself in the way only smug people can be, I opened the link and was immediately appalled by the quotes in the article by LaBarbera who ghoulishly began using the Weber murder to push the agenda of his web scam, I mean Internet based activist organization, Americans for the Truth about Homosexuality, which is running lurid and ham-handed editorials about how gays are more likely to perpetuate violence against other gays than heterosexuals (unlikely given the small percentage of the population they are) and how gays have a hook-up culture on Craigslist that is somehow different from the hook-up culture on Craigslist among straight people.

Of course, none of this would be relevant to the Weber murder even if it were true. Weber, as I said before, is not responsible for his death. He didn’t take responsibility for his safety, which people need to, but that isn’t to say he deserved or caused his murder. Weber’s death was caused by three things:

1. New York’s anti-self defense culture
2. The naivety of big city liberalism when it comes to crime
3. The acceptance of sexual violence which exists in the general culture and isn’t specific to gays

In other words any cultural criticism that comes from the Weber murder applies to society as a whole, not a sub-group of it. New York has a legal environment where proactively tending to your safety is impossible and criminality is explained away in college freshman level sociological terms. This creates victims who do not understand how criminals think and cannot defend themselves when they are targeted. There has been a shift in adult entertainment where sexual violence is becoming mainstream and because of the reach of the Internet “rough sex” (which is really sadomasochism) is becoming an accepted “kink” that many people believe is safe and harmless to indulge in. All these things apply to heterosexuals as much if not more so than they do to gays, but LaBarbera dishonestly claims the problems are the province of gays alone.

It is as wicked as it is dangerous because he has convinced his followers and anyone who takes him seriously that they themselves would be safe on Craigslist as long as they aren’t looking for gay sex, which is a false assumption that creates hundreds of victims, as sites like CraigsCrimeList detail. Seeking strangers as sex partners is dangerous enough (perhaps its allure) but seeking strangers who are looking to abuse people compounds that danger, especially if you aren’t willing or capable of defending yourself if things go wrong. This applies equally to gays and straights. LaBarbera is just smart enough to know that, but has spent his time using his bully pulpit to paint this tragedy as something it isn’t, which is a crime that is specific to gays.

But for LaBarbera, all roads lead to the gays, and I suspect that if I spend enough time on his site I may discover that 9/11 was actually perpetrated by gays, a secret gay lobby controls our foreign policy and Al-Qaeda wants to restore a world-wide caliphate because they want to make LaBarbera their gay concubine. I suspect that would you attempt talk to LaBarbera about anything besides homosexuality, the conversation would be short to say the least.

Like a jilted lover, LaBarbera and his fellow crusaders seem incapable of simply not caring about what gays, who are adults who can make their own decisions, do with their lives. I understand that Christians have theological arguments against the practice of homosexuality, and I certainly can agree that it is offensive at best when gays interrupt memorials to Martin Luther King to prove a point, which I assume is that there are gays so tone deaf and self involved that they think spitting on the memory of King will get Black people to support gay marriage. But I have no interest, and neither should you, in the personal life of any consenting adults.

American gays have the same right you and I have to be left alone and live their lives as they, not some Communist like LaBarbera, sees fit. It is telling that almost all of LaBarbera’s arguments against homosexuality are Christianized versions of Marxist anti-gay propaganda. Not being a Christian myself, I can’t speak for them, but I was under the impression that Christ tells Christians to hate the sin but love the sinner. LaBarbera isn’t acting very Christian in this respect since he isn’t lovingly inviting gays to join him in fellowship, instead he sounds like a street corner Marxist reading out accusations of capitalist decadence from his badly xeroxed copy of Worker’s World Daily, pining away for the day when Comrade Jesus sends gays to re-education camps the way Saint Castro did.

LaBarbera is a spiteful, sad shadow of the “patriot” that he tries to pass himself off to be. In reality, he’s a parasite clinging to the right while slowly eroding the essential values of conservatism. I’m an old-school Reaganite, I believe in limited government, maximum personal freedom, low taxes and a strong military. Other than that, I’m not interested in weighing in on other Americans’ lives. LaBarbera is, and that is antithetical the Founding Fathers’ dream of a country where every citizen has their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness protected by a Republican government which stands between minorities and the tyranny of the majority. I thought he might have learned that when he was threatened with death last year by zealots as driven as he seems to be.