PATRICK, TEXAS — Kellen Ryan is a confused man. The 42-year-old self-described “Fundamentalist Christian Republican” told followers of his Facebook page, SuperBiased America, that after the events of the deadliest shooting in U.S. history at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando he feels himself “warming up” to ISIS, and that has the normally “extremely Islama-skeptical” Ryan quite confused.
Ryan opined in the Facebook post that part of him “wants to react like [he]” always does after radical Islamist terror attacks, and call for keeping all Muslims out of the country, but another part of him “really [does] understand” why the gay club was attacked.
It’s gotten me to thinking about ISIS. Maybe, just maybe, they’re what the Bible meant when it said that the Lord moves in mysterious ways. Perhaps I wasn’t thinking about ISIS with a clear head, and that at the end of it all, religious extremism makes for strange bedfellows. Maybe I don’t have the balls to murder 50 people because I think the way the fuck is icky, but I do have the balls to advocate their subjugation under discriminatory laws, so yeah, I really do understand this attack on some level. And that level is the anti-LGBT level, of course.
Mr. Ryan insists that while he could “never, ever, ever” perpetrate the level of hatred and violence on LGBT people that the Orlando shooter did, the “crusader for Christ” in him wants to “at the very least commend their dedication to traditional marriage values.”
I never would have thought in a million years that I’d have anything in common with a Muslim extremist. I always thought Christian extremism was its own unique, truly blessed version of sycophantic, dogmatic religious beliefs that make us say and do horrible, regressive things to people whose lifestyles we don’t agree with. And while I could never, ever, ever do this, you have to at the very least commend their dedication to traditional marriage values. At least the Crusader for Christ in me does.
Before the shooting in Orlando, I have to admit that I thought the only tools we had to oppress LGBT people were laws about where they could poop and laws that make it legal to fire them for being LGBT. I had totally forgotten there are Second Amendment remedies too. It’s pretty awe inspiring to see someone fight so hard for traditional marriage values, even when that someone is a person you’d normally not trust simply because of their religion.
Ultimately, while Mr. Ryan says that he’s not capable “at this point” of taking his fundamentalist views to the degree that the Orlando shooter did, he admits that ISIS “seems much less scary” to him, now that he knows they “at least understand how important it is to keep LGBT people oppressed” to God, “even if their God is clearly not the same God as mine, and even if he was, we worship him totes better.
I’m not saying I’m about to join ISIS, folks. I’m just saying they’re kinda growing on me. I’m warming up to them, if you will .Who knows? If we could team-up with the French to beat the Lobster Backs to form this perfect, never could be any better union of ours, then maybe we radical American Christians could team-up with ISIS on a future project some time. I just believe in keeping my options open, is all.
Ryan ended his Facebook post by calling for “good, clean, ammo-hoarding, red-white-and-blue loving Christian American patriots” to “rise up, shoulder-to-shoulder with anyone willing to do battle for the sake of traditional values.”
Even if that means occasionally having common ideological and political views as murderous religious sycophants of a different stripe than our own old fashioned, American Christian bigots. God Bless America, God Bless the Republican Party, and God Bless keeping adults from loving each other based on our arcane, millennia-old religious texts!
