Sunday April 15, 2012, marked the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, and that anniversary is being raided for every penny that can be made from it. James Cameron is out to make even more money with the 3D version of Titanic, surely one of the worst scripts ever to have been produced, but the US political Right has proved even more shameless than that.

In a video on the Truth That Transforms website, which has been mercifully edited down by Right Wing Watch (unlike Cameron’s  behemoth), the American people are warned that the “homosexual agenda is the moral iceberg that we need to steer clear of”. It is painfully awkward metaphor that is used to introduce shameless fear-mongering about the debate over LGBT rights and same-sex marriage. The leading actors of this production are so paranoid that they would be better off in an institution on a cocktail of prescription drugs, not out in public spreading lies and disinformation.

As usual with the Right, they blatantly reframe the narrative and present themselves as the persecuted, not the persecutors, and present the struggle for equal rights as “the biggest threat in our lifetime to religious freedom and the fundamental values we share here in America”. It is like watching a propaganda film from the 1950s about the threat from Communist infiltrators. At the end, the right-wing historian Bill Federer, who is less historian more confabulator, concludes “there are just a couple steps before the military could be used in a persecution of those that are viewed as enemies of the new state belief system”. This is not about the truth that transforms but the lie that terrorises.

This typifies the backlash against equal rights that is currently on the rampage, and is being used in the West world to engender fear, and in developing countries to maintain the criminilisation of anything that is not the santified mainstream.

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