Robert Oscar Lopez, who runs the Texas chapter of the anti-LGBTQ group MassResistance, joined CatholicVote’s podcast in late February to respond to news that MassResistance had been banned from sponsoring a table at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which he linked to dwindling morality in the conservative movement as evidenced by the elevation of some gay conservatives.
Lopez defended MassResistance founder Brian Camenker’s comments that “there is a place for being insulting and degrading” in the fight against LGBTQ rights, saying that “nowhere in the Old or New Testament are we instructed to deal gently” with “people in positions of power that are trying to force sinful actions on you and trying to destroy the moral order of your society.”
Lopez and the podcast’s host, Stephen Herreid, then complained about how some people who identify themselves as conservatives are really just “exploiting an opportunity that has been given to them because the left failed so miserably” and are coming in “like war profiteers” in the wreckage left by liberalism without espousing traditional conservative morality.
“I think the left has been just so bad that they let us get lazy as conservatives, because all we had to do was just point out the ridiculousness of the left and we felt like we were advancing some conservative project, when that’s not really the case, Lopez said, particularly calling out campus conservatives who “behave essentially like spoiled kids.”
“I think on the LGBT front, it’s particularly pronounced,” Lopez said, “because there has been this constant attempt to put forward gay conservatives and to find gay people who will criticize the left and to pat them on the back and make them feel incredibly special because they’re gay and not liberal. I don’t see anything honorable about being a homosexual and wanting low taxes and a strong military. If you’re saying that you want to pay less in taxes and you also want to have no restrictions on the kind of immoral behavior you engage in in your own life, that’s not honorable, that’s not something that conservatives should put forward as a model for themselves.”
