Why would Meet the Press think it's appropriate and "newsworthy" to give open and unabashed bigots a seat at their table? And worse, treat their bigotry as a reasonable position without pushback and recalling all the other times that civil rights have prevailed even though troglodytes like Jim DeMint and Ralph Reed have stood in the way of progress?

And yet that is exactly what David Gregory did this Sunday by giving former senator and current Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint and former Christian Coalition and eternal grifter Ralph Reed a chance to opine on the recent Supreme Court decisions striking down DOMA and (effectively) Prop. 8 in California.

Of course, poor Jim DeMint sees this as a discrimination issue--discrimination against people like him from being able to let their bigotry and ignorance fly free (because no population is more persecuted than Christian white heterosexual males in this country) without being made to feel bad for their hate.

Thank the FSM that Rachel Maddow was also present just to point out the basic fact to DeMint and Reed that just because you advocate discrimination against gay people as a way to express disapproval for homosexuality, you do not change the existence of homosexuals:

“Gay people exist,” Maddow said to Reed, “there’s nothing that we can do that make more or less of us exist. And you’ve been arguing for a generation that public policy ought to essentially demean gay people as a way of expressing disapproval. But you don’t make any less of us exist. You just are arguing in favor of discrimination.”

“I really can’t let that go,” Reed responded. “This suggestion that because somebody wants to affirm the institution of marriage that they’re ipso facto intolerant, by that argument, Barack Obama was intolerant 14 months ago.”

Maddow pushed back on that, but I'm going to disagree with her on that. It was intolerant from Democrats too and just as unacceptable. It was based on ignorance (and religious teachings, which have no place in government policy) and is not any more acceptable. The difference being that the Democrats cited by Reed to try for cover for his current bigotry have gone through an evolution in thought (brought on in no small part by the tireless work of gay activists) and realized that creating a class of second class citizens in no way comported with the values of this country.

For the most part, the rest of the country has made that evolution too. Would that the Sunday news shows not give those who have yet to leave the primordial swamp of backwards thinking the validation and legitimization.