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10:36 pm EST 19°F (–7°C) in South Rockwood, MI
Calendar of Updates | Also, I wanted to report on Michigan’s presidential primary election, which took place a week ago today. Following the advice promulgated by the progressive political blog DailyKos, I crossed over and cast a vote in the Rethuglican primary for Mitt Romney, contributing one vote toward his eventual victory in the state. Basically, the Democratic primary was meaningless without Barack Obama and John Edwards on the ballot, and with the threat by the DNC to refuse convention seats to Michigan’s delegates anyway, so the thinking went, why not fuck things up for the GOPstapo? With Mike Huckabee’s victory in Iowa and John McCain’s in New Hampshire, Romney represented the third different winner in four (to that point) nominating contests, thereby leaving him viable longer and causing Rethuglicans to run more nasty attack ads against one another. Now, on to this edition of “open the mailbag.” I received an e-mail from a person identifying herself as “Brenda” just moments after the calendar had flipped over to January 7 here (still the 6th in Brenda’s time zone, though). Right off the top, she launched into the talking points used by so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’,” saying, “You have made your choice” as though sexual orientation were a choice, and it got worse from there with “You are responsible for your life right now and in the end when you die and where you go from there” before the end of that paragraph. You know, Brenda, if you’re trying to “save” gay people, implicit threats of eternal damnation for something so fundamental to our God-given identities isn’t the way to do it. Brenda also has a lot of completely unfounded assumptions about me and the millions of other gay people put here on earth by God, apparently placed into her memory banks by lying “Christian” preachers for later robotic recovery and dissemination. Cover your keyboards to protect them from vomit as you read this terribly spelled and punctuated gem: [I]f your not happy about the way your being treated by your lifestyle why announce it. Since it is going to bring you unhappiness. Since when have I ever said that my God-given homosexuality makes me unhappy? The answer to that question would be never. I would be far more unhappy with lying to myself and others, trying to maintain a heterosexual facade just to have the approval of people like Brenda. That would truly be a “lifestyle choice” that would bring me unhappiness — and not only me, but worse yet, others to whom I would be lying about my God-given nature. The cognitive dissonance and direct contradictions of the Bible in Brenda’s message, sometimes within the same sentence, are mind-boggling. Here’s another great snippet: If you feel that putting up this website will help others you need to understand you are not responsible for them. You need to understand the whole of the responsibility lies with you and your life. This doesn’t exactly comport with Matthew 25:40, which tells us, “Whatsoever you do to the least of My people, that you do unto Me.” If I don’t do my part to show others how so-called “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” are habitual, reprobate liars about gay people and homosexuality, I am likewise leaving Christ Himself to the wolves. No one can live your life for you or walk in your skin or even take the journy of death with you. I’m not asking to have my life lived for me, nor am I trying to live anybody else’s life as Brenda seemed to suggest earlier. That last clause, for somebody who is as trapped in “fundamentalist” ways of “thinking” as Brenda is, seems awfully nihilistic — isn’t the whole point of being “a good ‘Christian’” during life that you get to meet God in the journey of death? I can hear the cock preparing to crow three times for Brenda. But if you do truly meet a true christian person along the way, perhaps they can share with you the love and guidence that is to be offered to one confused and scared of so many opinions. Again, this is Brenda simply regurgitating the lies she has been fed. When have I ever indicated that I am confused and scared? What this statement of “confusion,” and a later repeated use of it, represents is an attempt to belittle GLBT people as mental children, essentially. This is a manifestation of the “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” tendency to view everybody else as mental two-year-olds who they can scare like older siblings always try to do; this will be better explained as the topic of a future post here, but for now it will suffice to say the tendency exists. That is often the first thing that parents in denial of their son/daughter’s just-revealed homosexuality say: “How can you possibly know you’re gay? You’re probably just confused.” This completely discounts the YEARS the son/daughter has spent carrying on a very adult struggle to accept him/herself the way God made him/her, without falling into earthly anti-gay traps laid out by society. It is belittling, dehumanizing, and intended to deny the gay person’s full adulthood in all aspects of life. The parents of a gay person may not necessarily mean it that way, and many will eventually realize just how wrong such a view is as they work through their own emotions. Often, this involves grieving the loss of their own hopes and aspirations for their son/daughter, which probably included grandchildren at some point. However, “fundamentalist ‘Christians’” remain forever trapped in this worldview, because they have to have some method of viewing GLBT people as “less” than themselves. What Brenda said in her e-mail is a perfect example. May you go in peace and find the correct path to wisdom of freedom and not earthly delights that will degrade you and another in this ripple effect of the life you choose for now. Let’s see here, I count at least three “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” anti-gay talking points in this sentence. There is the reference to “earthly delights” which, the way Brenda used it here, applies equally to heterosexual activity; there is the statement that the said “earthly delights” will “degrade” me somehow; and another reference to sexual orientation somehow being “chosen.” The mere fact that a sexual act involves two men or two women doesn’t make it “degrading” in the least; any “degrading” aspect would necessarily have to involve abuse of some sort, which can occur in heterosexual sex as well. You know what’s even better about all of this? I can tell from my site logs that Brenda didn’t even read anything in my “Being Gay” section before writing her screed. Here’s a look at the relevant entries from the logs, with meaningless information stripped out:
This means that Brenda entered the site at 9:52:26 pm MST, or 11:52:26 pm EST, on Sunday, January 6, from a Yahoo! search for the phrase “jesus hate gays” (how very “Christian” of her), and landed on the essay “Why Do ‘Christians’ Hate Gays?”. Just 21 seconds later, she linked from that essay to the main “Being Gay” section page, and another 37 seconds after that, she loaded the contact page to begin writing. You mean to tell me that somebody can absorb anything, much less a reasonably long essay, in 21 seconds? Call the Guinness Book of World Fuckin’ Records. What is more likely is that Brenda only needed 21 seconds for “gay” to register as a so-called “dog whistle word” — a word used as code to notify its hearers that they had better think a certain way, much like “playground basketball” is intended to stoke irrational fears of thuggish, violently criminal young African-American males. I have a thank-you page set up to be loaded when people send a message through the site, and that registered a hit in the logs from Brenda’s IP address at 10:08:41 pm MST (12:08:41 am EST Monday, January 7), one second after the e-mail’s SMTP timestamp. It only took Brenda 15 minutes to put all of her dripping hatred through her keyboard and into my inbox. The combination of these two things — just 58 seconds spent in the site before starting to write, and the e-mail of at least 20 sentences only taking 15 minutes to compose — prove beyond a doubt that Brenda is irretrievably trapped in the incorrect “fundamentalist ‘Christian’” worldview about human sexuality. She might have learned something if she had actually read what I had to say, but liars have convinced her that doing so would be “inviting Satan into her life” or some garbage, so she remains trapped in that lifestyle — truly a disgusting, degrading lifestyle, with its constant attacks on “the other.” Well, I have a few things to do yet tonight before I start another week of work tomorrow afternoon. It’s time to go get on those, so I wish you a good night and happy trails until I return. |
