Days After Calling for Liberals to be ‘Shot,’ Catholic Leader Says Not ‘Literally’

To Austin Ruse, it would seem language isn’t something to be taken literally. While Ruse believes in some semblance of literacy as it pertains to the Bible – that, say, Jesus was God incarnate, and that his (“His”) word is the only method for obtaining eternal bliss – there are other moments when words are just words. That their meaning shouldn’t mean what they mean. That they shouldn’t be taken literally.

That, at least, is Ruse’s latest excuse for some recent comments that tossed the Catholic leader and head of the anti-gay hate group C-FAM, from hackneyed religious moralist to infamous Christianist. Earlier this month, while bemoaning America’s moral backslide, Ruse determined that much of the blame lies at the feet of those woefully wicked professors populating America’s secular universities. Offering a solution, Ruse, speaking as a guest host on American Family Association radio, was blunt. “[T]he hard left, human-hating people that run modern universities,” he said, should “all be taken out and shot.”

Those leftists. Those human-haters. Those running the modern institutes of higher education. Shoot ’em all, just for their views.

Reactions were, fortunately, swift, and Ruse was promptly placed on the defensive. Instead of apologizing for his views, though, Ruse dug in, spinning blame onto those upset. He intoned that those at Right Wing Watch, which catalogued Ruse’s comments, had “their panties all in a twist,” with “dumb” and “stupid” liberals listening alongside.

A few days later, Ruse finally acknowledged the crassness of his comments. Instead of a straight apology, though, Ruse revealed that his comments were all, you know, a figure of speech. “It was not intended to be taken literally,” Ruse wrote. “I have dedicated my life and career to ending violence.” And that may, indeed, be true. But when you take to a nationally broadcast radio station and call for an entire caste of professionals to be “taken out and shot,” all that previous work at purportedly ending violence smacks reeks of both hypocrisy and posturing.

Fortunately, Ruse’s words ended in a bit of action. AFA fired Ruse for his comments, noting that he would no longer be retained as guest host. The right wing news site Breitbart, however, still retains his services as columnist. It seems Breitbart doesn’t mind if their writers’ words are meant to be taken literally, or if we’re just supposed to guess what Ruse actually means.

Image: Austin Ruse via his Twitter page

Casey Michel is a graduate student at Columbia University, and former Peace Corps Kazakhstan volunteer. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, and Talking Points Memo, and he has contributed multiple long-form investigations to Minneapolis’s City Pages and the Houston Press. You can follow him on Twitter.