A Refresher on How to Not Be a Huge Pile of Festering Shit

Today, it came to my attention that a friend of mine from high school and her wife received a piece of hate mail. Or at least I think it was hate mail; it was only semi-literate. Apparently, the authors of this letter are in possession of a computer application wherein the end user chooses a bunch of religious words and then watches as the computer vomits a random assemblage of these words onto a piece of paper. (This application is also used to draft Tea Party speeches.) So the letter went something like this:

"God is watching satan praying for you blah blah blah"

And then, perhaps coincidentally, a collection of words resembling a sentence:

"God wants you to listen to this dvd, satan doesn't want you to."

Accompanying this letter was a DVD entitled, "Satanism and the Homosexual Agenda: A 1-Part Teaching by Pastor Joe Schimmel."

One thing I will say about the author(s) of this letter: They make my job easier. Low-hanging fruit, so to speak.

This will not be one of those columns you see where people list out all the other stuff in the Bible that modern religious extremists have chosen to ignore despite their steadfast grip on the one liner anti-gay clause in the Old Testament. This argument never works. "The Bible advocates [something ridiculous, like eating babies]! Do you do that?" LGBT advocates will say in response to the Bible-thumping homophobes. You can't go down this path. It's not helpful. Because the answer is probably yes. Bible-thumping homophobes probably do eat babies. These fuckers have some skeletons in their closets that would make Ted Bundy look like Big Bird, and no one needs to see that.

Normally I wouldn't address the authors of this letter. People who write hate mail like this and then go out of their way to obtain a DVD featuring a pastor whose name makes him sound suspiciously like a Nazi war criminal are beyond my help. They won't (can't?) read this column, and even if they did, they would denounce it as Satan's influence and send me hate mail that would probably offend me if I could muddle through all the grammatical errors.

But say that you do own nine copies of Heinrich Himmler's Joe Schimmel's one part series on Satanism and the Homosexual Agenda. And say also that you can read this (a suspicious claim at best, but fine). Here is my advice to you.

It's 2013. Get over it. Mentally, you're stuck in 1837, though honestly, for everyone's sake, I wish you were there physically, too.