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The far-right radio host thinks the Agriculture Department's outreach to rural LGBT people is a conspiracy to destroy conservative communities.
The Obama administration is trying to "attack" rural American by persuading lesbians to become farmers -- or, so goes a new conspiracy theory from Rush Limbaugh.
The right-wing radio host posited this last week on his widely syndicated show, basing it on a report from a conservative news outlet, the Washington Free Beacon. The Beacon had published a somewhat snarky story on a Department of Agriculture LGBT outreach program with the headline "Feds Holding Summits for Lesbian Farmers."
"You sit in there and laugh," Limbaugh told his listeners. "OK, go ahead and laugh at it, but I'm telling you what they're doing. They are trying to bust up one of the last geographically conservative regions in the country; that's rural America."
"Here comes the Obama regime with a bunch of federal money and they're waving it around, and all you gotta do to get it is be a lesbian and want to be a farmer and they'll set you up," he continued. "I'm like you; I never before in my life knew that lesbians wanted to be farmers.
"I never knew that lesbians wanted to get behind the horse and the plow and start burrowing. I never knew it. ... The objective here is to attack rural states. They're already attacking suburbs, and that has been made perfectly clear by what happened in Milwaukee. They're going after every geographic region that is known to be largely conservative. They never stop, folks. They are constantly on the march."
Limbaugh ignores the fact that LGBT people are everywhere, including in rural communities. The outreach effort is a way to assure that they are aware of and have access to government and nonprofit programs that will make their lives easier. The Agriculture Department's Office of the Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights has partnered with the National Center for Lesbian Rights and Cyndi Lauper's True Colors Fund to conduct a series of summits with LGBT residents of rural areas around the nation.
And maybe, to Limbaugh's chagrin, a few more LGBT Americans will indeed decide to take up farming!
