Despite their professed loathing of identity politics, conservatives have always had a bit of a weakness for political narratives in which they themselves are victims of some form of oppression. (It's at the point when folks start talking about the ways conservative policies keep down other people that the right no longer has any patience for such "victimology.") Perhaps not coincidentally, it's often the most strident right-wingers who are simultaneously the first to scream to the heavens about their being oppressed.
An example: Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who recently told a right-wing radio host at CPAC that LGBT people were seeing their rights recognized by more and more branches of state and federal government because they were intimidating the American people.
Repeating a profoundly disingenuous talking point that's currently popular on the right, Bachmann claimed that the recently vetoed anti-gay law in Arizona known as SB 1062 (or, colloquially, Arizona's anti-gay Jim Crow) had nothing to do with LGBT rights and was only depicted that way in the mainstream media because of nefarious gay bullies.
"There’s nothing about gays in there, but the gay community decided to make this their measure," Bachmann said. "And the thing that I think is getting a little tiresome is the gay community have [sic] so bullied the American people and they have [sic] so intimidated politicians that politicians fear them and they think they get to dictate the agenda everywhere."
"Well, not with the Constitution, you don’t,” Bachmann added.
Speaking of the political movement to thwart SB 1062, which was completely nonviolent and nonthreatening and conducted entirely through free speech and the democratic process, Bachmann said that “If you want take away my religious liberties, you can advocate for that, but you do it through the constitutional process and you don’t intimidate."
"[A]nd no politician should give away my religious liberties or yours,” she continued.
You can listen to Bachmann stand up to all those coercive thugs in the LGBT community below, via Right Wing Watch:
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