Here is all you need to know about the hypocrisy of the modern gentle bigot, who argues against people's rights while claiming no ill will, courtesy of the New York Times' profile of Prop 8 mastermind and tireless homophobe Frank Schubert:

Mr. Schubert said that while he tailors messages to each state, certain themes have proved effective: that marriage between a man and a woman is the tested foundation of a stable society, that children do best when raised by a married father and mother, and that "it is possible to respect the rights of gays and lesbians without redefining marriage."

"This is a difficult argument," he said, "because it sounds as if we're saying gay couples can't have loving relationships or care for children, which is not the case."

This one is also very telling:

For his part, Mr. Schubert, who has a lesbian sister raising two children in a domestic partnership, says, "It's hurtful to know that many people think I dislike gays and lesbians and wish them harm."

Bigotry, unlike sexuality, is not an innate quality; it is defined by behavior. No one would be "hurtful" to Schubert by assuming anything about his ideology if he didn't transform that ideology into his life's work and place greater emphasis on ideas like "tradition" and "the future" instead of actual human lives. You can say that you don't hate the person that you just shot in the face, but the bullet hole begs to differ.

You see this kind of waffling everywhere, this rift in people who do anti-gay things while attempting to persuade us that they aren't actually anti-gay. It's an infuriating component in contemporary rhetoric, because it reveals a certain spinelessness. When I posted pictures and tweets from brazen Chick-fil-A supporters earlier this year, so many of them took exception to the republishing of their public words. Some of them deleted their accounts. What cowards. If you're going to actively align yourself with the continuation of one minority's inability to function as fully operating citizens, the least you could do is mean it. Otherwise, you're maligning for sport.

Erik Eckholm's Times story allows Schubert to claim that he is not hateful, while asserting "gay rights leaders despise Mr. Schubert." (Nuh uh — they just hate his sin.) It also points out that Schubert "had not thought much about the marriage issue, he said, before he was tapped in 2008 to run the Proposition 8 campaign." Well, of course he didn't, since gay people getting married has no bearing on his life. Schubert claims that keeping from normal couple things like visiting each other in hospitals and inheriting each other's things without exorbitant taxes is God's plan for him.

It's a good financial plan, too. The Times reports that he has made a business out of interfering with lives that are none of his business. Schubert, who runs the consulting agency Mission: Public Affairs, "continues to do well, receiving monthly fees of $10,000 to $20,000 from each of the four state campaigns and earning a commission on the voluminous ads he places on radio and television." Good As You has a more specific breakdown.

So when Schubert does hateful things and then claims not to hate, all the while eating the resulting profits, what we're witnessing is a heaping pile of cognitive dissonance that looks and smells like bullshit.

[New York Times]

[Photo credit: AP]