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Hate in the Mainstream

Remarkable quotes from people who ought to know better.

“[W]e shall not have any coarse [sic] but armed revolution should we fail with the power of the vote in November.”
—PONCH McPHEE, editor of the Greene County, Va., Republican Committee newsletter, who in the same March 19 column described President Obama as “a political socialist ideologue … unlike anything world history has ever witnessed”

“The so-called ‘gay’ movement is rooted in sorcery and it is a child of the devil, and an enemy of everything that is right.”
—MIKE HEATH, co-founder of Maine’s No Special Rights Super PAC, which opposes “sodomy based marriage,” in a March 27 blog post

“We got to do something about these Asians coming in and opening up businesses and dirty shops. … They ought to go.”
—MARION BARRY, Washington, D.C., city councilman and former mayor, who later apologized for his April 3 comment

“I and my coworkers could rewrite the book on whether our urban youths are victims of racist profiling or products of their failed, shitbag, ignorant, pathetic, welfare dependent excuses for parents.”
—Miami-Dade firefighter BRIAN BECKMANN, in an April 11 Facebook comment about slain black teenager Trayvon Martin that resulted in his demotion

“Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch.”
—Pastor SEAN HARRIS of Fayetteville, N.C.’s Berean Baptist Church, who later said his April 29 comment wasn’t meant to encourage violence against children

“I think that one of the greatest mistakes America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote. … They’re voting in people who are … gonna take us down this pathway of destruction.”
—JESSE LEE PETERSON, an ultraconservative black preacher who once thanked God for slavery, in a YouTube sermon publicized by RH Reality Check on May 7

“Build a great, big, large fence ... put all the lesbians in there. … Do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals, and have that fence electrified so they can’t get out … . [I]n a few years, they’ll die out.”
—Pastor CHARLES L. WORLEY, reacting to the president’s endorsement of same-sex marriage in a May 13 sermon at Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, N.C.