CLIFF DUNN, EDITOR

Last week, hundreds of thousands of students at thousands of schools across the U.S. participated in the 2012 National Day of Silence, a day established to draw awareness to the evils of bullying and homophobic violence.

It began in 1996 with just 150 University of Virginia students who possessed a degree of character and courage that crude words could never hope to capture. They did it at a time that seems like only yesterday but might as well have been a century or more in terms of the prevailing attitudes and by the measure of the strides we have made towards more complete LGBT civil rights.

Sadly, in 1999 the event was also used to commemorate the killing of Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student who was tortured and murdered because of his sexual identity in October of the previous year. This is just the sort of thing that many of us were raised to believe rallies people to their humane best, giving pause to even the most ardent in spite and vitriol for just a moment as they connect with their humanity—that part of it that rails against injustice and violence in the service of no cause other than mean-spiritedness and senseless destruction.

Then reality sets in—in the form of the religious and socially conservative Right, who use the opportunity to strike fear into the under-informed, the ignorant, and the intellectually lazy. The cartoonish Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council—an oafish and hungry Sylvester to the LGBT community’s bird-in-atenuous- cage Tweety—regurgitated to the choir last month that “we cannot allow these programs like the Day of Silence to come into our schools as a cover for the promotion of homosexuality,” with no thought to the bashed and broken body of a 21 year old who was left to die a lonely death on a lonely strip of rural road.

Was Connecticut pastor James Loomer thinking of a comatose Matthew Shepard—his precious life slipping away with the drops of his precious blood as he died slowly, tied to a fencepost—when he condemned the Day of Silence as “promoting vile, graphic, foul language, and child sex”? It seems to me that he was anything but Christ-like, invested as he was with something akin to the foulness of Shepard’s killers, who justified their actions with the “gay panic defense,” and temporary insanity induced by a sexcrazed Shepard’s sexual advances.

These good, God-fearing, churchgoing men have truly created a Christ in their own image if He tolerates such “spokesmen” as Fred Phelps. This muscular brand of Christianity fuels an Americanized version of the style of hatred that was exhibited by doting fathers and husbands during the 1930s Nuremberg Rallies of the Nazi Party.

It certainly bears no relation to Christ’s injunction of “a new command I give you: Love one another.” How do such sanctimonious and un- Christ-like men as Perkins and his Florida clone, David Caton of the Florida Family Association, reconcile their support for “bullies’ rights,” and the hellish treatment so starkly depicted in the film “Bully,” with the unsettling statistic that close to nine out of 10 LGBT students report harassment at school during the past twelve months, based solely upon their sexual identity? Another 30 percent say that they regularly miss school because they fear for their personal safety: Do Perkins and Caton realize the irony that they are endorsing the very sort of behavior that Christ himself was subjected to in his final extremity? Do they care?

During last Friday’s commemorations, students handed out palm cards that read: “Please understand my reasons for not speaking today. I am participating in the Day of Silence (DOS), a national youth movement bringing attention to the silence faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their allies. My deliberate silence echoes that silence, which is caused by anti-LGBT bullying, name-calling and harassment.

I believe that ending the silence is the first step toward building awareness and making a commitment to address these injustices. Think about the voices you are not hearing today.” Not exactly a call to storm the Principal’s Office and get “gay” all over the file cabinets. Yet Loomer, the Connecticut pastor who attempted to ban the Day of Silence in his small suburban parish, astonishingly said about these handouts that “If parents came to know the inappropriateness of materials they’d be enraged,” adding, “It’s revolting.”

The actions of the Extreme Religious and Social Right compare to nothing so much as the corruption of moral principles in the service of evil that is regularly engaged in by the practitioners of Islamo-fascism. Indeed, they share the same cultural and philosophical heritage that all proponents of tribalism practice:

Terrified by the encroachments and ideas of a “modern” world that challenges their medieval outlook and way of life, they retreat to their actual and ideological strongholds and await the wrath of a righteous and angry God, and then— disappointed by His centuries of inactivity on that front—determine themselves to bring the fight to the infidel. The result: twin towers aflame and in rubble, and thousands of innocents dead.

I think the comparison between Christo-fascists and Islamo-fascists is apt, as both promote intolerance, bigotry, hatred, ignorance, humorlessness, and fanaticism against the “western” ideals of freedom, tolerance, creativity, science, literature, humanism, and love of learning.

Who do you admire more, Salman Rushdie, or the man who condemned him to death, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini?

Who do you think they admire more?

God help them, and us.