On Tuesday, a website based in Oklahoma, MooreDaily.com, ran a story featuring Facebook conversations from a Republican candidate for the Oklahoma House of Representatives. Scott Esk, who is running in Oklahoma’s 91st District, made a number of posts last summer critical of homosexuality and stating that “we would be totally in the right” to execute gays by stoning them. He stated during the Facebook conversation that while he is a libertarian, and stoning gays to death is kind of against those principles, he feels that it would morally be the right thing to do by God, and that it is a shame that this nation ignores things that are worthy of death.
MooreDaily.com was able to catch up with Esk and ask him about his thoughts on stoning gays. He essentially said that he didn’t want to comment on private conversations and that he doesn’t plan on bringing up a law that would make homosexuality punishable by death. Which is good to know.
If you want to read the entire Facebook thread from last summer, you can check it out here.
What is truly interesting about that thread is that Esk was called out for both his contradictory statements and simply regurgitating scripture to make his points. When he was pressed to actually give his own thoughts, rather than cut and paste verses from the Bible, that is when he openly stated he had no problem with killing gays. Later down the thread, after getting pushback, he did what many anti-gay bigots who hide behind the Bible do — he brought up pedophilia. Essentially, he equated homosexuality and pedophilia and wanted to know what others felt should be a reasonable punishment for “victimful crimes” like pedophilia.
This whole thing comes on the heels of red states like Oklahoma and Kansas trying to find ways to lawfully discriminate against gays, or find ways to get around dealing with the inevitability of gay marriage. An Oklahoma representative proposed a bill that would make all marriages illegal if gay marriage was made legal in the state. Earlier this year, Kansas tried to pass one of the most discriminatory bills since the Jim Crow era, making it to where businesses would be able to lawfully discriminate against LGBT people if the business owners felt it interfered with their ‘religious freedom.’ Thankfully, the Kansas Senate nixed the bill, but only after much outcry from the business community, who knew it would be a deathknell economically for the state.
Finally, you have to love to self-described libertarian who seemingly has no problems with supporting laws based on his own personal religious views. It helps to show that many libertarians are really just self-centered a-holes that cherrypick laws they think should be enforced and then cry about government when it suits them. Laws based solely on moralistic grounds culled directly from the Old Testament? Sure, let’s get that bill written and passed! Pass sensible gun control laws or keep tax rates fair to keep public services operational? You are infringing on my liberty!
