A video dropped from the sky showing Christian preacher Jason Graber of the Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Spokane advocating for the execution of the parents of transgender kids by a gunshot to the back of the head. This video is echoing all over the interwebs. It is important to realize that managers who oversee news distribution are duty bound to allow only items that attract the greatest number of eyeballs through the filter. Their job performance is judged on this basis. They curate the news minute-by-minute as it happens.

Graber is a small frog in a very large pond. He and his flock are a small group in Spokane. However, I’m sure that his homophobia and anti-trans speech rhymes with what a great many people believe. You do not have to be explicitly pro-gay or pro-transgender to see that these views are a stage-4 malignancy in our democracy.

However, there is nothing new to this kind of vile speech. This is part of hellfire and brimstone preaching that has been in America since the very beginning. Only today it is amplified and distributed broadly in the Mulligan stew of today’s electronic media. Who would have guessed that the invention of the transistor would lead to this?

Plainly this preacher-man does not represent the views of all Christians. Population attributes are generally distributed as a normal distribution or sometimes called a bell curve with extremes on each side. Let’s say in this case that on the left extreme are those of Christ-like temperament of love and forgiveness and on the right extreme are those of hellfire and brimstone temperament. This character is obviously on the hellfire and brimstone end of the curve. In a normal distribution the population of extreme members is low and the bulk of the members are midrange. The mathematical ideal is sometimes called a Gaussian distribution after the great mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss**.

Brother Graber is very much on the extreme end of the curve, even for a fundamentalist. But the freakshow he puts on causes much rubbernecking on the great interstate highway of life. It makes him look bigger than he really is. Media rewards extremism with large viewership. Look at #45, the Elephant Man of media. You just can’t take your eyes off him.

One weakness of members of the human distribution is that many are liable to believe that his outrageousness is a measure of the purity of his righteous devotion to God. He is devoted alright. To a bronze-age deity who plays favorites and metes out lethal justice to the infidels. Historically, this kind of deity has always held an appeal to people. It so happens that I am not one of them. Tradition can offer great comfort for many. But it can also be unneeded baggage that bogs you down in the muck of obsolete beliefs. It is the imaginary cosmology of Deities, a theory of the universe that sees angels and demons lurking behind every tree. What’s behind every tree? The backside of the tree of course.

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**My blog name, Gaussling, is in honor of Gauss and in no way is meant to suggest that my mathematical abilities are anywhere near his. Au contraire.