Here in the red states, many people (urged on by hate radio, no doubt) seem to think that anti-discrimination laws shouldn't protect gay people from being targets of the government or other laws, because that's just a "special right" for the gay folks.

For everyone who believes that, go read this story now. The Nashville police department is openly and unabashedly targeting gay men in a drug sting operation. Their agent is going online to gay chat rooms, explicitly and repeatedly urging men to come have sex with him and bring any controlled substances they have, and sometimes even has sex with them. Then they're arrested - even if they don't even know if the substances they asked them to bring are illegal or not.

Remember, every action taken by the protagonist of this story was completely legal under Tennessee law. Can you imagine what would happen if a police department somewhere set up a sting operation, sending a confidential information online to Christian Web sites, urging people to come over and pray with him, so that the police could arrest them for imagined charges?

What's more annoying is that you probably can't imagine that even happening in the USA, but picking on the gay folks, well, that's OK. Happy pride week!

(Via Metafilter.)