The ramping up of the persecution complex by obsessive gay-hating fundies like Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association begins as the Values Voter Summit approaches. It is some serious Bullsh*ttery out the wazoo, via People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch, which will be there covering every last moment of that conference so you don’t have to.

Video #1: Bryan discusses with senior fellow Peter Sprigg, why TEH HOMOs must suppress their sexual orientation.

[Fischer says] his anti-gay outlook represents a “more noble view of humanity” than the worldview of gay rights advocates. Sprigg went on to say that “in terms of their identity, we as Christians believe that every human being is born in the image of God, and to be born in the image of God is a far higher and better thing than for anyone to be born gay”

Video #2: Bryan says he’s just telling the truth, not fomenting bigotry. He’s so misunderstood, isn’t he?

Fischer also addressed People For the American Way’s letter to Mitt Romney and the New York Times story on the issue that asked why Romney is appearing directly before Fischer, despite his virulent anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-Native American and anti-Mormon rhetoric. Fischer said that he has “done nothing but tell the truth about homosexuality, about gay rights, about Muslims and Mormons,” and that when you “tell the truth, as far as the left concerns, [it is] unmitigated bigotry.”

The passing of  Rev. Shuttlesworth and continuing tension surrounding the comparison of the black and LGBT civil rights movements.

On a day overshadowed by the coverage of the passing of Steve Jobs, we also lost a civil rights leader who literally took body blows for racial equality. The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a contemporary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rep. John Lewis and others who put their lives on the line, died at 89.

In his home base of Birmingham, Alabama, the epicenter of Jim Crow, Shuttlesworth was on the ground organizing weeks of demonstrations involving children, clergy and students who faced the power and wrath of the Commissioner of Public Safety for the city, Bull Connor, who unleashed fire hoses and dogs onto the peaceful demonstrators, with the cameras rolling. From the NYT:

The brutality helped galvanize the nation’s conscience, as did the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing of a black church in Birmingham that summer, which killed four girls at Sunday school. Those events led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, after the historic Alabama marches that year from Selma to Montgomery, which Mr. Shuttlesworth also helped organize. The laws were the bedrock of civil rights legislation.

“Without Fred Shuttlesworth laying the groundwork, those demonstrations in Birmingham would not have been as successful,” said Andrew M. Manis, author of “A Fire You Can’t Put Out,” a biography of Mr. Shuttlesworth. “Birmingham led to Selma, and those two became the basis of the civil rights struggle.”

Mr. Shuttlesworth, he added, had “no equal in terms of courage and putting his life in the line of fire” to battle segregation.

When there is outcry from members of the black community decrying comparisons of the LGBT rights movement to that of the black civil rights movement, this kind of activism and sacrifice is pointed to:

[F]ew doubted his courage. In the years before 1963 he was arrested time and again — 30 to 40 times by his count — on charges aimed at impeding peaceful protests. He was repeatedly jailed and twice the target of bombs.

In one instance, on Christmas night 1956, he survived an attack in which six sticks of dynamite were detonated outside his parsonage bedroom as he lay in bed. “The wall and the floor were blown out,” Ms. McWhorter wrote, “and the mattress heaved into the air, supporting Shuttlesworth like a magic carpet.”

When he tried to enroll his children in an all-white school in 1957, Klansmen attacked him with bicycle chains and brass knuckles. When a doctor treating his head wounds marveled that he had not suffered a concussion, Mr. Shuttlesworth famously replied, “Doctor, the Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head.”

It’s an unnecessary zero-sum game to say that one’s level of sacrifice for human rights should be equivalent in suffering to achieve equality. Human rights are human rights regardless. But leaders of the LGBT movement has to stop, listen and understand why it’s hard to listen to emotion behind the rejection of the comparison.

Aside from direct action arrests we’ve seen GetEqual and other grassroots groups, LGBT faces of “activism” have been people who have perished because of violent anti-LGBT persecution — Harvey Milk, Matthew Shepard, Gwen Araujo, Lawrence King, etc. Aside from Milk, a public official and activist, most of our icons were not public figures engaged in any action aside from being a living human being. In the U.S., current visible leadership in the fight for LGBT equality don’t have to deal with their houses being bombed, face jail time, or are the victims of repeated bloody beat-downs. Most live a comfortable existence in gay enclaves and work within the political system.

That’s why you see the comparison can seem raw to those who have lived through the black civil rights movement; I understand that as someone who is both black and gay and live in the South, and whose grandparents were part of the movement in North Carolina. But trying to “rank worthiness” isn’t a universal viewpoint, as you know, because two of the strongest allies for the LGBT rights movement have been Julian Bond and Congressman John Lewis (D-GA).