Today's nominee for Headline of the Year: Anyone have a cow I can borrow for a few hours?

If Kevin Swanson’s Son Got Gay Married, ‘I’d Sit In Cow Manure And I’d Spread It All Over My Body’

After interviewing both Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal at his “National Religious Liberties Conference” this morning, radical right-wing pastor Kevin Swanson returned to the stage to discuss the issue of how Christians are to live in an increasingly debased and secular society. During his remarks, Swanson reiterated his view that both the Old and New Testament require the death penalty for the crime of homosexuality, as well as his position that any Christian who attends a gay wedding can only do so in order to hold up a sign informing the couple that they ought to be put to death. He drove home his point with a passionate declaration that if he ever found out that his own sons was gay and that son invited him to his wedding, he would show up covered in “sackcloth and ashes” and then smear himself in cow manure as he sat on the steps of the church and wailed lamentations.

On today’s episode of “Great Moments in Unfortunate Religious Imagery,” we try to wrap our heads around über-Christian prayer warrior extraordinaire Kevin Swanson bathing in cow manure (Try purging that one from your brain). That might appeal to those who like their Christianity served with heaping portions of love, acceptance, tolerance, and inclusion- sorta like what their Lord and Savior preached, but a reasonable observer might find themselves confused. I mean, here’s a man who believes himself to be a committed Christian (He must be; he publicly proclaims his love for Jesus Christ at every opportunity), and yet he’s obsessed with homosexuality and homosexuals (to the point of wishing them dead). Swanson spends so much time thinking about Teh Gayz, in fact, that it’s hard not to wonder what he’s so afraid of and why he’s s intensely focused on consenting adults doing icky gay things to one another behind closed doors.

Apparently lost on Swanson is the truth that there’s nothing in the Gospel of Jesus Christ that condemns homosexuality. In fact, the Christ he loudly proclaims reverence for was all about love, acceptance, tolerance, and inclusion. I’m not certain which Bible Swanson’s been reading, but his God certainly seems to one angry, vindictive, mean-spirited son of a bitch. Swanson’s theology, heavy as it is on hatred, rejection, intolerance, and exclusion, doesn’t begin to resemble what I was taught during my Sunday School days. Lutherans, not exactly renowned for espousing a libertine theology, still somehow managed to teach me that Christian charity, love, and tolerance are actual things…you know, things the Lord actually taught.

Outside of Swanson’s bastardized, overcooked, hate-fueled theology, the idea of him showing up at church in sackcloth and ashes and rubbing cow manure all over his body while wailing lamentations (or even show tunes) has a certain appeal to it. I’m not certain if that’s a new fetish or merely his way of drawing yet more attention to himself. Either way, I’d recommend staying safely upwind.

It’s what Jesus would do…right??