OBJECTIVELY PRO-NECROPHILIA!!!!!1!!1!

According to the religious right, that's what America will be -- heaven forfend! -- if the evil Satanic liberals in Congress have their way. Here's an "action alert" from the American Family Association:

Congress is set to give legally protected status to 30 sexual orientations, including incest. Because of pressure from homosexual groups, Congress has refused to define what is meant by "sexual orientation" in H.R. 1913, the "Hate Crimes" bill. This means that the 30 different sexual orientations will be federally protected classes.

(If you're not sure how the second sentence above follows from the first, well, join the club. But read on.)

To see the orientations that will be protected by the Hate Crimes bill (H.R. 1913), click here.

Which leads us to a list of sexual inclinations, kinks, and quirks that will allegedly receive government protection from the hate crimes bill:

Apotemnophilia - sexual arousal associated with the stump(s) of an Amputee
Asphyxophilia - sexual gratification derived from activities that involve oxygen deprivation through hanging, strangulation, or other means
Autogynephilia - the sexual arousal of a man by his own perception of himself as a woman or dressed as a woman
Bisexual - the capacity to feel erotic attraction toward, or to engage in sexual interaction with, both males and females
Coprophilia - sexual arousal associated with feces....

I'll stop there. Go to the link to read the rest. It's a mixed list that includes utterly harmless stuff (transvestism, transsexualism), a few fetishes, and, um, a few crimes (incest, pedophilia, voyeurism). I can't tell whether the folks at the AFA thinks we godless liberals all think these things are equally OK, but I kinda think they do. (By the way, if you're erotically into stumps, and you find a willing amputee who accepts your inclination, I don't see how this harms me.)

This is actually a repurposing of a 2007 attack by the Traditional Values Coalition on a proposed Clarification Of Federal Employment Protections Act, which never got out of committee. The 2007 TVC attack has itself been repurposed as an attack on the hate crimes bill, spelling errors and all. (It's "frotteurism," not "fronteurism." And, given that it's non-consensual, any decent liberal is going to be very much against it and fully in favor of maintaining its status as a crime.)

You know, if we supported half the stuff right-wingers think we support, we'd deserve to be opposed, if not shunned. I wonder if I'll live long enough to see a day when ourpolitical opponents oppose actual policies, not phantoms that exist only in their own brains.

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UPDATE: Via Deeky at Shakesville, I see that the Liberty Counsel (in a press release entitled "Hate Crimes Bill Protects Cross-Dressers and Pedophiles but Not Veterans or Grandmas") has picked up on this "30 'sexual orientations'" meme, I confess to admiring your message discipline, guys.

The religious rightists cite the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) to support their claim. But Deeky says:

... pedophilia is not listed as a sexual orientation or a gender identity in the DSM IV. In fact, the DSM IV doesn't include a list of sexual orientations at all.

The closest this comes to truth is that the DSM IV contains a section titled Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders. This is broken down into two smaller groups, the paraphilias (wherein pedophilia resides) and the separate gender identity disorders (which would, presumably, be covered under the proposed statute) and are really only still considered mental health disorders so that trans people with insurance can get their treatment covered. It's only by applying a judicious dollop of mendacity that one can contend that the new Hate Crimes Prevention Act is a way for the government to protect "pedophilia and every imaginable deviant fetish" and promote "coercive pro-homosexual propaganda". (For those who don't keep their own copy, you can peek at relevant section of the DSM IV here.)

But when has the right let a little thing like the truth stand in its way?