Exhaustion. Yes…I Know The Feeling…
Some mornings, by the time I’ve finished breakfast and read the first news reports of the day, I feel exhaustion for no other reason than the fact that I’m a gay American. I wonder if my fellow citizens who spend their days campaigning and crusading to limit my civil rights – the civil rights that they themselves take for granted – ever consider the inhumanity and irrationality of what they do? And I wonder if the millions of Americans who stand by apathetically and allow this travesty to play out with each passing day ever consider the emotional anguish they are deliberately or carelessly causing to millions of children, teenagers and adults?
This weekend KETV Omaha has provided live coverage of the "Love Won Out," Focus on the Family conference intended to "curb homosexuality" and promote "the truth that change is possible for those who experience same-sex attractions," At the same time, Don Imus is fired for making a horribly tasteless and grossly inappropriate joke about a group of black women. Oh well, who cares about a bunch of fags? Obviously not any of our prominent civil rights crusaders.
No kidding. Or about the welfare and safety of gay kids either…
In what is clearly an orchestrated strategy, students and parents across the nation are suing public school systems to force them to allow professional bigots to advocate gay bashing and self-loathing on school premises.
Yup…
I wonder how many straight Americans wonder what it’s like to live with the fear and reality that in most parts of this nation you can be legally fired from your job, denied housing, refused a room in a hotel or barred from public facilities simply because of your sexual orientation. I wonder if they wonder how a gay child feels when he or she is called an abomination, prevented from attending a prom with his or her high school sweetheart, or beaten up in the schoolyard while homophobic teachers look on with contempt.
If one assumes – and I do – that given the right information most people will do the right thing, it is very difficult to understand the degree of homophobia and outright hatred that manifests itself in this great nation. Why are we, as Americans, so out of synch with other Western democracies? Why are civil rights more widely protected and honored in the EU, in South African and in Canada then in the land of Jefferson, Madison and Lincoln?
I think it has something to do with that old joke about how Australia got all of England’s criminals and America got all of England’s religious fanatics and between the two countries America got the worst of the bargain. Seriously…I don’t think the rest of the civilized world really appreciates how dangerously nuts religion here in America has become. And in these times, gay people have become to the religious right, as the Jews once were to the Nazis. If you think that is hyperbole, you are not paying attention.
Time was they could demonize Jews as Christ killers. But after the Holocaust, antisemitism stopped being a winning proposition. Just ask Mel Gibson. Then Antia Bryant showed them what playing the gay card can do for the bottom line and suddenly they had a scapegoat they could demonize all they wanted and and they didn’t even have to call us Christ killers to do it. But, per the androgynous and almost certainly gay Satan in Passion Of The Christ, which almost nobody outside the gay community remarked on during the din of offense over Gibson’s waving around the blood liable, you can see the day coming when the passion plays will have replaced The Eternal Jew with The Eternal Faggot as the villain responsible for nailing Our Savior to the cross. Maybe they’ll start playing Judas as a homosexual too. Then every Christmas break can be followed by a rash of January school yard gay bashings, followed by James Dobson’s annual washing of his hands before the advocates for abused children, at Focus On The Family HQ…
