The latter half of last night’s channel four news had me flying into a white-hot rage. On it, they reported how an evangelist christian singer in the states had come out as a lesbian, and how she was struggling to reconcile her sexuality with her fundamentalist faith. They then set up a debate between her and a pastor who claims homosexuality to be a type of mental illness, against god and so on. The question it left me wondering was, why do we still give airtime to such bullshit? I immediately tweeted to Channel four news,why do you have bigoted imbeciles who invoke outdated superstitions to promote homophobia on your program? That’s all it boils down to: the guy was using an outdated, irrational belief system to legitimise bigotry. In any other situation, no tv channel would waste their time on such stupidity. If, say, someone said they believed in a invisible flying monkey and that that monkey demanded he persecuted everyone who wore glasses, he would probably be institutionalised for his own safety and that of others. Why then are these pastors in america allowed to spread their hatred and intolerance? Is it not time we saw their twisted bastardised religion for what it is and treated them like the deranged bigots they are? Surely it is time we, as a civilisation, start to give religion the scrutiny it deserves, for that which motivated the bigoted homophobe also motivates people in the middle east to strap bombs to children and send them to die. If religion can be used to legitimise persecution; if it can be used by men to demand an authority they do not deserve simply by quoting a discredited, outdated text; then it is time we outgrew it. It is time we treated such ‘pastors’ as the hateful madmen they are, either institutionalising or medicating them as we would any other schizophrenic who claimed to have imaginary friends, or else ignoring them as we would ay other fascist.