As numerous Conservative religious pundits have pointed out over and over and over again, THIS sort of thing is not the fault of religion.

See, this is the sort of thing that happens when uppity members of a minority group forget their place and start asking to be treated like everyone else.

The Religious Conservative pundits will tell you that if “the gays” would just be quiet and stop making trouble and stayed in the closet, they wouldn’t get hurt.  It’s this “gay marriage” thing,  and the “I’d like to have an equal chance at getting and keeping a job” thing, and the “please say they can’t kick me out of my apartment just because I’m gay” thing.

If “the gays” didn’t keep trying to “push their agenda”, we would all be peaceful and friendly and live happily in our don’t-ask-don’t tell-no-really-we’ve-just-been-roomates-for-forty-years” society.

Pffffftht!

Yeah, and Mathew Sheppard was murdered over drugs and money.  Amazing how fast the “gay panic defense” can turn to “we didn’t mean to, we just wanted him to tell us where the drugs and money were” when you find out that killing someone because they were gay isn’t a slam-dunk defense like it used to be, but has instead morphed into a hate crime while you weren’t looking.

And really, I don’t think it’s about religion either.  Seriously.  It’s about crazy people being able to hide so easily in religion.  This Mangum guy is insane.  Religion probably didn’t make him insane.  Just like the excessive religious zeal of the Virginia Tech shooter was more the product of insanity than religion.   He just, for some reason, felt more comfortable expressing his psychosis in terms of a religious approach to the world rather than the alternative.  Insanity makes anything but religion almost impossible.   Religion supports and validates and gives focus and direction to insanity that nothing else can.

Oh yeah, and one more thing.  It also protects it.  If someone says “the great talking walrus I saw in my bathtub told me to kill homosexuals”, we lock them up for their own good and everyone else’s.  If someone says “God says we should kill homosexuals” he gets to have his own organization, and important Republicans invite him to all their parties and give him lots and lots of money.

And when something like this happens, the religions conservative pundits will shake their heads and say how unfortunate it all is, and isn’t it too bad that the “gay agenda” made this Mangum guy so mad he had to go out and kill a gay man. And those who preach the hate by quoting directly from the Bible will get yet another pass.  Forget about Hate Crime Legislation.  You won’t even be able to get one person from the mainstream media to get up and say something about how preaching hate is wrong and leads to murder.

Because they don’t want to piss off those who worship the Bible.  Those poor, powerless persecuted Bible worshipers.

(Hat Tip: Pharyngula)