Real Talk On Rush

Rush Limbaugh died yesterday. He died of cancer, which is not a death that I’d wish on anyone, even a racist, homophobic, toilet troll who made his living punching down on the powerless with unparalleled zeal and cruelty. Rush was a sadist; an opportunistic gremlin with a platform, who once ran a segment at the height of the AIDs crisis gleefully mocking and celebrating those who were dying from the awful disease.

This man never met me, but he hated me. He hated women, specifically feminists, and he took special delight in mocking and deriding feminism whenever he had the chance. He hated BIPOC people. He used the n-word often, in its entirety on his show. He had a special hated from LGBTQIA+ people though; a burning need to deride and punish them every chance he got.

He’s dead now, no doubt looking up at us, and his most ardent supporters are taking to social media to condemn the glee that many of us feel, specifically that we should play nice. After all, a man is dead. Take a dive into the stinky dumpster of egos and unsubstantiated facts that’s your average Facebook feed and you’ll see them- invoking, of all things JESUS. Implying that Rush Limbaugh was a man of God, doing God’s work and that anyone mocking him with the crude but effective hashtag #restinpiss is a heathen meanie.

It would appear that Evangelicals are spinning off the rails to defend Rush, using the same playbook they employed to link their God Emperor Trump with Jesus. This blatant hypocrisy irks me because Jesus was way cool. Jesus would have hated Trump and Rush. He would have been comforting dying AIDs victims during the height of the crisis, not mocking them to disco music on a putrid radio segment for laughs.

So what exactly are the Evangelicals smoking? As an Ex-vangelical myself, I’ve seen behavior like this before; the clannish bullying that permeates certain types of more radicalized churches. Radical Evangelicalism, which isn’t reflective of Christianity as a whole or Jesus in the slightest, hinges on power structures. In radical Evangelicalism, there are hierarchies, specifically related to gender and so-called traditional families calling for women to submit to their husbands. Through that warped lens, both feminism, and LGBTQIA+ are a threat to this narrow worldview.

Racism is a problem in many of these churches as well. A 2019 poll shows that 86% of white Evangelical Protestants see the Confederate flag as a symbol of southern pride rather than racism. Of course, on a more micro-level, there’s also the standard lily-white Jesus with piteous doe eyes that proudly adorns sanctuaries across the country.

Churches like these, where power structures are rigidly followed and anyone who doesn’t get with the program, or can’t get with the program, is ejected are looking for strongmen. They are looking for the Rushes and the Trumps, and to a lesser degree the Pences or the Sean Hannitys, because they want someone at the helm that can uphold “traditional values” and power structures. The problem is, those traditional values weren’t so great for a big part of the population, and what these churches see as an attack on their values is simply pushback from people who are sick of hiding who they are or being marginalized.

Rush capitalized on so-called traditional values and stoked the fires of fear that hairy-pitted feminazis were coming for your balls, so they could dangle them from the rearview mirror of their Prius while having lesbian sex and taking the Lord’s name in vain. He preached that gay people were perverted monsters who were coming for your kids. He was not a man of God. He was the furthest thing from what Jesus taught. He openly spat in the face of one of Jesus’ top mandates, “love thy neighbor”, but he defended the radical Evangelical church power structure, which is why they love him.

Evangelicals need to decide who they serve; a fragile, exclusionary, archaic power structure that keeps people down, or the true teachings of Jesus. Perhaps they should also read the words of Matthew 23, which specifically details God’s hatred of hypocrites and hypocrisy.

Also, Rest In Piss Rush.