The Gaystapo and the difference between Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler

During an undergraduate Political Science class a few decades ago one of my professors discussed the difference between Stalin and Hitler. While both were indeed power hungry and responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people, they were distinctly different in motivation.

Stalin, he suggested, was completely focused on power. He didn’t care how he got it or who he had to work with or betray in order to get it or keep it. If you were in his way, he would crush you and not think twice about it. If however you got out of his way and ceased to be a threat, he likely would not care.

Hitler, my professor opined, was another animal all together. While he too was focused on power, power was not his animating influence. The superiority of the Aryan race was. Like Stalin, he would work with those he didn’t respect, and he too would crush anyone who was in his way both enemies and erstwhile friends. But with Hitler there was something more. He wanted to eliminate or exterminate the “Untermensch” or those deemed subhuman. This group included Jews, gypsies and slavs among others. Some could be “Germanized” such as the slavs, while others, like the Jews, had to be exterminated. And in the case of the Jews, had Hitler been given the chance it’s likely he would have sought to exterminate them from every corner of the earth.

And that, according to my professor, was the difference between the two. Stalin wanted power for power’s sake, and so long as someone wasn’t a threat to him, he largely didn’t care. Hitler on the other hand wanted power because he felt it rightfully belonged to him and his race and because those he considered defective sullied the human race, and had to be eliminated, wherever they were. He was a fanatic to the cause.

All of this came back to me when I read a piece on RedState.com titled “Gaystapo Takes No Prisoners: GoFundMe Torpedoes Sweet Cakes” about the torpedoing of a GoFundMe account set up to support an Oregon couple persecuted by the state for not baking cakes for a gay wedding. Gaystapo is a term I’d never heard, but it immediately seemed to fit. Like Hitler’s Gestapo, the secret police who were above the law and responsible for eliminating threats to the Reich, the Gaystapo seems to believe their role is to eliminate what they consider threats to the gay agenda, wherever they may be.

Just as my professor suggested that Hitler would have sent his troops to the far corners of the earth to eliminate the Untermensch Jews, apparently the Gaystapo seek to eliminate the religious freedoms of any who disagree with them. Whether it’s bakers or photographers or pizza makers or chapels, those whose religious convictions compel them to decline to participate in gay marriage activities must be driven from the public square – even if the issue is purely hypothetical. They should be sued or harassed or prosecuted into oblivion, First Amendment be damned.

And we’re not even talking about people who refuse to serve gay customers, which most of the offending proprietors happily do, but rather, we are talking about people who simply decline to participate in gay marriage activities. Indeed, in some of these cases the targeted establishments had served the aggrieved customers for years and when declining to service the wedding even suggested other businesses that would be willing to participate. Nor is any actual damage required for someone to use government to score a windfall. The tyranny of the Gaystapo is not so different than that of the ADA enabled shakedown artists who earn tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars by searching out targets to drag into court, or simply threaten to do so. Those who believe their faith compels them to decline to participate must bend their faith to the gay agenda or fear state sanctioned prosecution.

One has to wonder where the Gaystapo stops. Once they have forced all businesses to comply with their agenda, do they then get to press charges against a formerly resistant photographer if the photos he’s forced to take come back a bit blurry or off color? What about entrepreneurs who lose their businesses, should they be allowed to get a job at another business even if their views don’t change? What about Christians and Muslims and anyone whose religion holds that homosexuality is a sin, will they have to be sent to reeducation camps? When the transition of marriage logically leads to the union of three or four or five people will hoteliers be prosecuted for not featuring ten foot wide beds?

It’s interesting, in a painful sort of way, that in a nation where the Constitution says nothing explicit about civil rights, somehow the civil rights inferred from its words (or in state constitutions) are now being used to trample on religious rights explicitly protected in its most important amendment.  Of course Hitler came to power legally under the German Constitution and then eviscerated it as he rallied an entire nation to his malevolent cause.  Let's hope the Gaystapo is not as effective as his Gestapo.