KKK Markets Anti-Marriage Equality

The soaring crow or eagle and the carrion beetle that burrows in decaying flesh share much. They have many differences, but each is happy to make a meal from a rotting animal.

Thus, the infamous Ku Klux Klan is increasingly happy to market itself to Americans as being anti-same-sex marriage. While that does not mean that VoteOnMarriage people here are Klan members, isn't it fascinating that they speak of the same concepts in the same words on this? Do you suppose that the brightest of them might take pause from knowing that the KKK agrees with them, down to the wording?

A new report by the Anti-Defamation League, Extremism in American: The Ku Klux Klan Today, highlights how the anti-SSM rhetoric is part of the resurgence of the group. Also, you can visit some KKK sites, like the Confederate Knights, to read the same logic, wording and Bible verses on the subject.

Marriage equality does not seem to bring in as many hateful types as immigration. Yet as the ADL report starts:

The Ku Klux Klan, which just a few years ago seemed static or even moribund compared to other white supremacist movements such as neo-Nazis, has experienced a surprising and troubling resurgence due to the successful exploitation of hot-button issues including immigration, gay marriage and urban crime.

Of course, to most Americans, even those who would openly praise anti-SSM amendments, the KKK remains too fringe. Yet, the group has been bold enough in a few places to protest SSM publicly.

For example, a little over a year ago, it did this is Texas, and not a rural farm but in urbane Austin, at the capitol. As News8 there reported it, about a dozen members -- none in robes and hoods -- demonstrated for the amendment to put a state constitutional ban of SSM in place. While 3,000 demonstrated against them and the amendment that passed.

At the rally, the leader of the state KKK sounded like our own anti-SSM folk. "We're asking Texans to support Proposition 2 because God supports it, not because the KKK supports it,'' Steven Edwards. In Texas stereotype, he has a 10-gallon title -- Grand Dragon of the American White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas. In the style of many who oppose marriage equality, he does not find it blasphemous or presumptive to speak for God.

In its Recent Development section, the ADL report notes KKK activity outside the traditional deep South and Midwest roots. For example:

Themes such as immigration and "black crime" have been common at Mid-Atlantic area Klan events. When Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Pennsylvania leader Mike Busch announced in 2006 that his Pennsylvania members wanted to hold a rally, at Keystone State Park, he told a reporter that "our messages are about immigration, same-sex marriages, and many major other topics that are killing our society today."

That would be easy to attribute those words to the anti-SSM folk in Massachusetts or Maine. So far, we have not seen such KKK activity in New England. We can also be pretty sure that the local anti-SSM folk would disavow any knowledge of or affiliation with the KKK.

No, back to our carrion birds and beetles, it is what they do, and in the case of the humans, what they say, that links them in spirit and practice. What is that New Testament line, Matthew 7:16, By their fruits ye shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

It is by deeds -- their fruits -- that we know the nature of the bird, beetle, and those who hide behind their religious trappings to hurt others.

Here we think of the Talmud, which has the clearest expression of the Golden Rule that so many religions share. That which is hateful to you, do not do to another. That is all the law. The rest is commentary.

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Tags: massmarrier, Ku Klux Klan, VoteOnMarriage, Anti-Defamation League, same-sex marriage