Conservatives Freaked Out By Lesbian Farmers

Yes. It is true. Conservatives are freaking out because lesbians can be farmers too. And apparently there is something wrong with that. What has them all worked up is the “Iowa LGBT Rural Summit,” which took place on August 18 at Drake Law School. To make matters worse, the summit was co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which joined with the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

The Drake University official news release explained,

Many LGBT people choose to live, work, and raise their families in rural areas. To highlight the unique needs of this community, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has partnered with Drake Law School, One Iowa, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and True Colors Fund to organize the Iowa LGBT Rural Summit.

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This event is the 15th summit in the nationwide LGBT Rural Summit Series and #RuralPride Campaign, which aims to elevate the voices of the rural LGBT community, highlight the important federal policy efforts to protect this community, and identify next steps to ensure all rural communities have access to the resources they need.

The Iowa LGBT Rural Summit will share information about programs and services that exist to protect, promote, and strengthen LGBT members of rural communities. Issues related to housing, education, healthcare, youth empowerment, and more will be discussed.

So yeah. Pretty scary stuff for right wingers who can never find enough stuff about which to be frightened. Rush Limbaugh launched into one of his famously incoherent rants over it, exclaiming,

“Have you heard the latest Democrat scam? Have you heard about the Agriculture Department’s financial grants to lesbian farmers? You think I’m making this up? See, this is how they do it.”

Limbaugh insists it’s not actually “about lesbian farmers. What they’re trying to do is convince lesbians to become farmers.”

Oh dear.

Why would Democrats want to encourage lesbians to become farmers, you ask? Rush has the answer: “They are trying to bust up one of the last geographic conservative regions in the country, and that’s rural America.”

“Rural America happens to be largely conservative. Rural America is made up of self-reliant, rugged individual types. They happen to be big believers in the Second Amendment. So here comes the Obama regime with a bunch of federal money and they’re waving it around, and all you gotta do to get it is be a lesbian and want to be a farmer and they’ll set you up.”

Gosh darn it! Why didn’t that wily Kenyan Muslim gun-confiscating dictator Barack Obama think of this back in ’09? We’d have kept the House in 2012! The idea is patently ridiculous and makes the lesbians sound like pod people from some awful science fiction movie.

Rush is talking about Sarah Palin’s “real Americans” here, as opposed to people with New York City “values” or, no doubt, immigrants, unless they’re working as migrants picking the produce conservatives want to eat.

Limbaugh wasn’t the only one to freak out. World Net Daily had their usual unhinged reaction, assuming that the summit meant the administration was ignoring the threat of terrorism and that LGBTers had their priorities mixed up, since they should be more interested in being protected from ISIS more than, you know, being able to make a living as a farmer.

The Patriot Post was, if possible, even more unhinged than WND, asking, “Where does the Constitution enumerate the power for government to waste taxpayer dollars in such a manner?”

It might come as a surprise to the folks at the Patriot Post, but we liberals and progressives don’t like a lot of things our tax dollars are spent on either. But what this episode demonstrates is that there is literally nothing Democrats can do that won’t be interpreted by conservatives as a conspiracy meant somehow to hurt conservatives.

Keep in mind this is the demographic that puts the “only” in front of Black Lives Matter, so go figure they take helping LGBT farmers as an attack on white hetero Christian farmers. Theirs is the sort of either/or thinking that precludes Trump’s claim to want to “work together.”

As Democrats have stressed, from Obama on down, working together means all Americans being included, not just white people, and especially not just white males. And that includes gays and lesbians who want to be farmers.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.