Tom Mechler, the new Chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, says that he really wants to bring minorities into the fold. He also hates seeing gay or lesbian couples so much that one year ago, he threatened to cancel his subscription to the Amarillo Globe-News if they ever published a picture of a non-heteronormative smooch.

Formerly the party treasurer, Mechler was chosen from a field of four to lead the state party on Saturday. He made his cancellation threat at the end of an op-ed regarding the Amarillo Town Club, a Baptist-affiliated gym which had refused to recognize a lesbian customer’s family and earned some negative attention from LGBT couples in the area.

“The guy said we had to have a marriage license for our couples membership, and it has to be from Texas,” (Katie) Roberts said. “Well, we all know same-sex marriages are illegal in the state of Texas. I feel like he was just avoiding telling me that they didn’t recognize same-sex couples, but instead, I feel like he just lied to me about the policy.”

In an interview with Breitbart Texas after his selection this weekend, Mechler indicated his pleasure with minority outreach efforts by ‘outside groups’ in that state. “The local party has quite a bit of diversity,” Mechler said, “and the way we work with that diversity is to make sure everyone feels valued” — everyone except lesbians or gays, that is.

Evidently, he would not put Log Cabin Republicans in the same room with his “diverse” coalition of John Birchers and tricorner hat-wearing tea partiers.

In fact, Mechler’s op-ed a year ago is a classic case of rationalized hypocrisy on this score. Change all his references to LGBTs into any random racial demographic, and the prejudice of his words would be an embarrassment even to him.

Calling Roberts and her partner “two angry-looking homosexual women,” Mechler made a ridiculous comparison of the Amarillo Town Club to a dining establishment: “If someone is on a low-calorie diet and they go to a restaurant that doesn’t offer low-calorie meals, that eating establishment is not discriminating against dieters” — which would be clever if Roberts and her fiancee weren’t exactly like a minority family asking to be seated at a Denny’s and being refused service instead.

Were he sent a half-century back in time to attack interracial couples this way, Mechler would fit right in with the white supremacy crowd.

Dismissing the “lifestyle choices” of gays and lesbians, Mechler went on to claim that the real problem is with “activists” who hate free speech — a claim that sounds exactly like the segregationists who blamed the upheaval of the Civil Rights Era on the Selma marchers rather than the Jim Crow laws that were intolerable to them.

We have gone way past the point of reason in the attack by homosexual activists and other liberals who want to manipulate society to serve their purpose. I know a lot of great people, and I’m sure I know many who have a different sexual preference than mine. I just don’t know who they are since I don’t ask them about their sexual preference. It is not relevant to my interaction with them.

[…] If you say you believe in the biblical definition of marriage (which I do), or if you express an opinion that liberals determine as being politically incorrect, they will attack you — sometimes viciously — frequently making threats against your life and property. They call your comments and thoughts homophobic or hate speech.

Mechler is all about “free speech” until he sees an image of a gay couple kissing. His talking points come straight from the new gospel of bigotry in which right wing activists pretend their lives are in danger because gay people want to get married, and then excuse their prejudice as ‘free speech.’ In this form of special pleading, Mechler’s right to loathe and fear people different from himself — people who are apparently invisible to him — is elevated above the rights of those other Americans to receive equal treatment and accommodation.

In another column for the Globe-News eight years ago, Mechler wrote of his experiences in prison ministry, putting great emphasis on the “life decisions” which led to the incarceration of the men to whom he spoke. While he didn’t pull a Ben Carson and claim that prison sex ‘proves’ homosexuality is a choice, the article casts a revealing light on Mechler’s theme that gay ‘lifestyle choices’ are something that should be locked away, out of his sight.

It also highlights the essential narcissism of those who think their prejudice makes the world a better place:

When we leave this Earth, I doubt any of us will remember the size of our house or the kind of car we drove. Our only real legacy will be found in the lives of those we have personally touched by investing some of ourselves into making their lives better.

Indeed! Here is Mechler’s drone-video of his big, fancy house in the middle of Palo Duro Canyon, sited far away from any gay neighbors who might kiss where he can see them.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/kWEglMuMxzY[/youtube]

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