‘Values Voters’ Laugh As Glenn Beck Talks About Gays In Nazi Concentration Camps

The Values Voters Summit this past weekend included a supposed history lesson about the Holocaust by none other than right wing fanatic Glenn Beck. Of course, Beck’s “facts” were just plain wrong, but that’s been the boat he’s decided to sail, for years. But it was Beck’s audience reaction to persecuted gay people that was even more offensive than Beck this time.

As many people know, the Nazis used colored triangles to indicate what group a prisoner — who was likely to die — was from. Perhaps the most well-known is the pink triangle, which indicated the person whose prison uniform bore the patch was homosexual — or believed to be. An estimated 5,000–15,000 people wearing the Nazi’s pink triangle were murdered during the Holocaust.

“Does anybody know what the purple triangle was?,” Beck asked his audience. Someone yells, “Gay.”

“No, not gay — that was pink,” Beck responds.

The crowd laughs.

Did the mostly religious right Christian evangelist conservatives in Beck’s audience find the prospect of 15,000 gay people about to be murdered by Hitler’s thugs during the Holocaust to be amusing — enough so that they had to break out in laughter?

“It’s hard to know exactly what motivated each person in that room to laugh at that moment,” Sharona Coutts, Director of Investigations and Research at RH Reality Check writes in “Why Did ‘Values Voters’ Attendees Laugh About Gays Being Killed by Nazis?”

     ”Was it because it seems funny that gay people were also murdered in the Nazi concentration camps? Was it because of the apparent absurdity, in their point of view, of confusing ‘legitimate’ victims of the Holocaust (Jews, Christians, people with disabilities) with those who they believe might really deserve to be killed? What part of the audience’s “values” made that reference to gay people seem so funny?”

The annual Values Voters Summit was created by and is hosted by a certified anti-gay hate group, the Family Research Council. The Family Research Council is headed by none other than Tony Perkins, who calls gay people “intolerant,” “hateful,” “vile,” “spiteful,” and “pawns” of the “enemy.” Perkins falsely claims pedophilia is “a homosexual problem.” He says that being gay is “against God’s plan,” and “contrary to our nature and the way were were created.”

That’s just for starters.

No wonder the audience at the Values Voters Summit laughed at the mention of gay people in Hitler’s concentration camps, who were awaiting a slow and ugly death by starvation, or by beating, or by the gas chamber. Did any of them even consider that?

By the way, some of the other patches the Nazis forced their prisoners to wear included a red triangle, which the Nazis forced political prisoners, including liberals, communists, socialists, Freemasons, and anarchists to wear. And the black triangle, used to identify people who were mentally ill, alcoholic, drug addicts, and prostitutes.

Of course, yellow was reserved for the Jews.

But Beck, at his ludicrously incorrect fear-mongering best, claimed that the purple triangle was reserved for anyone who was a “Bible scholar!”

“If you knew anything about the Bible, you were an enemy of the state,” Beck falsely proclaimed.

“Why? Why? Because the truth shall set you free!”

Beck, of course was wrong.

As Right Wing Watch notes, the “purple triangle Beck held up was actually used to mark Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

    Jehovah’s Witnesses at the time were known as Bible Students or Bibelforscher, a reference to the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Bible Student movement.

RWW also points to Sharona Coutts’ piece, in which she writes:

    By allowing U.S. fundamentalist Christians to believe that the Nazis exterminated “Bible scholars,” Beck played into the narrative of victimization and persecution, and allowed them to appropriate the Holocaust as their own tragedy. Many of the Values Voters, of course, study the Bible every day, and Beck intended them to believe that the Nazis would have killed them for doing so.

    It is false to say that Nazis targeted ‘Bible scholars’ in the way that Beck’s audience was led to understand that term.

    By seeing themselves as victims and the targets of Nazis, many of the so-called Values Voters can justify their other political stances. This contorted logic allows them to frame their inability to impose their religious worldview on all Americans (and on other nations, for that matter), not as a sign of pluralism and democracy, but as religious oppression—oppression of their desire to impose their religion on everyone.

Why would Beck bother telling the truth, when it will set his millions of willfully-ignorant religious right followers free?

And why wouldn’t they laugh, when they’re perfectly comfortable spending a weekend at a convention hosted by an anti-gay hate group?

UPDATE: Bilerico’s John Becker was in the audience when this happened. He writes:

    Perhaps the most revealing moment of Beck’s 50-minute rant — and for this listener, certainly the most disgusting — came when he whipped out a binder full of concentration camp badges from his extensive collection of Nazi memorabilia. (Yes, Glenn Beck has an extensive collection of Nazi memorabilia. Let that sink in for a minute.)

Watch:

-The New Civil Rights Movement