I’ve had a lifetime front row seat watching the religious right trying to impose their beliefs on the rest of the country and it would be laughable if it weren’t so sickening.
I’m particularly sickened because I am a gay, Jewish person from NYC who grew up around black and brown people.
But even if I wasn’t, I think I’d nevertheless be nauseous at the mere mention of them at this point.
My parents made a lot of missteps – like, a TON of them – but the one thing they did correctly was to teach me to treat everyone equally and with respect.
Would that the U.S. Supreme Court and its hard right wing judges, who the religious extremists worked so crazily for decades to shoehorn into office by hook and, most recently, by crook, felt the same.
This week their labors bore big, bright bushels of fruit when their 6-3 conservative majority held in two cases managing to turn back the hands of time towards… the Crusades.
In one they put an end to affirmative action in colleges across the country by basically ruling that racial discrimination has largely been corrected since the civil rights era.
Right.
Tell that to George Floyd and his family.
In another they ruled that a web designer can refuse to design a website for a gay wedding because it contradicted with her religious beliefs.
Never mind that she was NEVER asked to design a gay wedding website and that the inquiry she mentions, which came AFTER the filing, is one that refers to the name of a STRAIGHT, WHITE MARRIED MALE who, when contacted, says he NEVER made a request of her to begin with.
Her reality is that it COULD happen and that her right to NOT express her ART in favor of the queers needs legal affirming.
Yeah, you heard that right.
This, of course, all follows the Dobbs decision of over a year ago that overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade case guaranteeing every woman in the country autonomy over her body by ensuring her the right to terminate her own pregnancy.
I’m not going to get into all three of these issues because at some point it becomes ludicrous to argue publicly against people who don’t read or listen to opposing opinions, or counter the judges who were implicitly contracted to further their agenda.
But suffice it to say that as a college professor I know as sure as I’m gay that racism is not over and that wealthy white students have a HUGE advantage over any other non-white student in the world when it comes to access and success.
It’s no one individual’s fault in 2023 but simply the way it is in a country that was built on the labor of non-white slaves.
What I also know as a gay bestie of more than one woman who has been able to have a legal abortion is that this is a personal choice that is nobody’s god damned business but her own. And that no female I’ve ever met or heard about decides lightly to end a pregnancy.
Instead, I want to spend what paragraphs remain proclaiming that the smirky, far right religious benevolence being expressed towards the gay community plays about as well as Anita Bryant’s crusade against gay teachers in the 1970s, William F. Buckley’s suggestion that gay people be tattooed and quarantined in the 1980s, and the desire of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and countless other evangelicals in the movement, embraced fully, if not publicly, by then U.S. President Ronald Reagan, to let gay people die of AIDS through passive governmental neglect, while condemning us verbally in the process, from the eighties through the nineties and beyond.
None of us buys the faux live and let live horseshit you’re selling, not now or then. And luckily, unlike in the 1980s and 1990s, the vast MAJORITY of the country now supports us.
I was reading an editorial by evangelical, conservative legal stalwart David French in defense of this silly web designer this weekend and I was amazed at how many complicated intellectual pretzels he had to twist himself into in order to defend her right to deny service to the man that she says emailed her for that gay wedding site who was actually straight and married AND had never emailed her.
In it, Mr. French, who filed an amicus brief in support of said designer, proclaimed that this case was NOT about whether (she could) refuse gay customers. That would be both illegal and immoral and he would not participate in such a case.
Except:
Rather, he claims this a first amendment issue. Meaning, this is compelled speech, where the government could require her to say things SHE found objectionable.
By comparison, Mr. French likened this to a portrait artist being required to paint a heroic picture of a white supremacist or a speechwriter penning an anti-gay screed on behalf of a right wing politician.
The not so hidden meaning is that GAY MARRIAGE IS AS OBJECTIONABLE TO A CHRISTIAN as a white supremacist is to a Black person or anti-gay screeds are to the average speechwriter.
But sure, the Christian right doesn’t HATE us gays.
It doesn’t mean squat that my marriage to my husband is being equated to the offensiveness of white supremacy or other unprintable bile said against me and my kind.
In fact, it’s an EQUAL comparison.
My marriage is THAT offensive.
My existence is THAT threatening to the bedrock principles this country stands for.
See, the thing about right wing, religious zealots and the people who embrace them, is that given enough time, space and words, their hate ALWAYS gets revealed.
We gays know this because we’ve experienced it first-hand, and it cost us a generation of friends and family, leaders and lovers.
We know their words of smirky bullshit are the opposite of kind or benevolent. And certainly unrepresentative of the equality for all this country at least tries (Note: Albeit too often fails) to achieve.
The vast majority of the country has moved on from the tortured, word salad, P.R. spin of bigotry now being offered by the 2023 Roberts Court and its Gillead-aspiring supporters.
And with enough time and voter turnout in the near future they will have as much relevance to our world as an Anita Bryant orange juice commercial or past episode of the 700 Club.
“Don’t Give Up” – Peter Gabriel ft. Kate Bush
notes from a chair 