It's staggering really that modern American Christianism supports wealth while Jesus demanded total poverty, fetishizes family while Jesus left his and urged his followers to abandon wives, husbands and children, champions politics while Jesus said his kingdom was emphatically not of this world, defends religious war where Jesus sought always peace, and backs torture, which is what the Romans did to Jesus.
At some point these charlatans need to be chased out of the temple. Which these days means the Republican party.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Degenerate Christianism
Andrew Sullivan:
Sunday Drive: You Are No Accident
Father Geoff Farrow:
The Prophet Jeremiah says, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you” and “before you were born, I consecrated you” (Jeremiah 1: 5.) Do you believe that about yourself? Do you believe that you are not “an accident” that your life has value and purpose? You are unique, gifted with a combination of talents, intellect; life experiences and attributes which no one else on earth possesses.Lovely words, lovely thoughts, Padre. Perhaps I would find it easier to put faith in them if I hadn't spent years listening to these very sentiments being read out from the pulpit already.
The two commandments [i.e., love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself], which Jesus teaches his disciples, serve to integrate us. First with our self. First, we must appreciate that we are created by a God who is love, a God who does not make mistakes, and a God who does not make trash. You are not defective, you are not disordered, and you are not deformed. Your gender, your eye color, the pigmentation of your skin, your intellect, and your sexual orientation is all willed by the Creator. You are willed by the Creator and the fact that you live and draw breath at this very moment is willed by the Creator.
The Creator has also created each other person on this earth as well as all other creatures and the planet and cosmos which sustain life. We are part of a larger organic whole. To hurt another person, creature, the planet, etc; is in fact, to hurt you. The consequence of hurtful decisions and choices creates a ripple effect in other lives and in the whole of the created order.
Once we learn to love and accept our self, we begin to move to greater personal wholeness and integrity within our self. We begin to see and actualize our yet unrealized potential. We begin to learn from errors of judgment. We become more sensitive to the hurts we have caused others and learn to ask for forgiveness and to avoid hurting others in the future.
We learn to become a living reflection of the Creator who is love itself. Who has moved beyond self to create others and me. We begin to see all of the created order and being ordered towards love, towards reintegration, towards potentials, which can only be realized in and through the other.
Sex is designed by God to require us to move beyond the self. If you look at the physical act of sex, it teaches you something of what is suppose to happen between two people in an intimate encounter. You undress, for intimacy to occur between two people it requires you to undress. Not just physically, but also emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. You reveal yourself to the other. Your true self, with all of your strengths and weaknesses. Your hopes/dreams and your fears and what haunts you. You become vulnerable to the other in this moment and they to you and the wonderful occurs when the other accepts you “as is.”
And then the preacher turned the page and began, "Do you not know that the effeminate and men who lie with men shall not inherit the kingdom of God? . . ."
Which put the lie to everything he had just said. And left me sitting on the edge of the dark and terrible abyss.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
I Just Made Love
Okay, so maybe that's just wishful thinking on your Head Trucker's part.
But now you can record all them notches on your bedpost and share the love with the whole wide world. Find out where people are getting it on today from Greenland to Tahiti here.
Pretty cool, I think. Geez, can't wait to put my little blue thumbtack on that map.
Too bad you can't order it like pizza. Not out here on the prairie, anyway.
But now you can record all them notches on your bedpost and share the love with the whole wide world. Find out where people are getting it on today from Greenland to Tahiti here.
Pretty cool, I think. Geez, can't wait to put my little blue thumbtack on that map.
Too bad you can't order it like pizza. Not out here on the prairie, anyway.
Mental Health Break: This One's for the Girls
That includes you and me, girlfriend. I love this song. Crank it up.
Becoming a Not-Man, part 2
Well, having slept on the idea and mulled it over some more, I've realized that I just don't want to revisit that horrible scene in print. Even after all these years, it's just too upsetting somehow; maybe another time, but not today. When I close my eyes and think about it, the time and the place all come back vividly to life, and I'm there once again. And that was a very bad place to be.
So I'm just going to make some general observations and leave it at that for now. It's hard to expose one's soul to the world, when it comes to the very deepest gouges, still raw and gaping and unhealed after so long a time. Back in the 70's and 80's, there was this idea that "therapy" would cure anything and everything, and after I had left the fundamentalist church that drove me nearly to suicide, I clung to the idea of "therapy" with the same fervor I had formerly devoted to religion.
But though both are touted as a panacea that will cure whatever ails you, my experience has been that both are frail reeds on which to lean. Seven years of Bible-thumping religion and then seventeen years, off and on, of therapy were both abject failures in my particular case. It may be that the one or the other at different times kept me going over some rough patches in life. Shipwrecked and adrift in the open sea, you clutch at anything that will keep you afloat, even a stray plank. But neither one addressed, much less healed, the wound at the center of my being, the wound, the hurt, the tormenting, unremitting pain of not being a man. A real man.
There. I said it. Oh dear God, do you have any idea how hard it has been for me these many years ever to put those words together and express to another person? Because this is the ultimate shame, is it not, for persons of the male gender - not to be a "real man." To be effeminate - to be a sissy. That, nothing cures.
I hasten to add, I'm not talking about being some kind of transsexual - though I can sympathize in general terms with those folks, and I just read today with sadness of the suicide of sportswriter Mike Penner aka Christine Daniels. Nor am I talking about any physiological oddity; all the parts are there and in good working order, trust me - though alas, at this late date subject like all other parts of the body to the creeping, damnable infirmities that come with age.
No, I'm talking about being an ordinary little gay boy who was a sissy and still is, and though he has learned through years and years of imitation and practice to more or less "butch it up" in public, still feels utterly lacking inside of some essential "manly" quality. Though time has softened the ache deep within - time does not heal every wound; some it simply wraps in bandages - it's still there, tender and throbbing if I uncover it. So after I tell my story, for whatever it's worth, I ask you to be gentle in your responses.
I've told this story - with halting words, many tears, gasping for breath - to a dozen people over the years, and it was extremely hard to do each time. It would be easier to admit to murder, rape, or theft than to admit to not being a man. Most of those people were therapists of one stripe or another; a few were very close friends.
And not one of them - not one of them, even the so-called professionals - was able to understand, to fully grasp what I was telling them. The uniform response from all of them, even close friends who had more opportunity to know me in depth than some therapists, was either: a) oh, that's not true; or b) that doesn't matter.
But it is true, and it does matter. Terribly.
To have this gaping hole at the center of your being. Bridge out. No passage. To feel forever incomplete, disconnected, impaired and imperfect deep inside: like the Scarecrow with the stuffing knocked out of him.
That is what it's like to be a Not-Man. To be some other kind of being, in a world where only being a Man is valid and admissible.
That's what it's like to be me.
Okay, I have to take a break now, guys. This is some hard shit to write. I'll try to continue later.
So I'm just going to make some general observations and leave it at that for now. It's hard to expose one's soul to the world, when it comes to the very deepest gouges, still raw and gaping and unhealed after so long a time. Back in the 70's and 80's, there was this idea that "therapy" would cure anything and everything, and after I had left the fundamentalist church that drove me nearly to suicide, I clung to the idea of "therapy" with the same fervor I had formerly devoted to religion.
But though both are touted as a panacea that will cure whatever ails you, my experience has been that both are frail reeds on which to lean. Seven years of Bible-thumping religion and then seventeen years, off and on, of therapy were both abject failures in my particular case. It may be that the one or the other at different times kept me going over some rough patches in life. Shipwrecked and adrift in the open sea, you clutch at anything that will keep you afloat, even a stray plank. But neither one addressed, much less healed, the wound at the center of my being, the wound, the hurt, the tormenting, unremitting pain of not being a man. A real man.
There. I said it. Oh dear God, do you have any idea how hard it has been for me these many years ever to put those words together and express to another person? Because this is the ultimate shame, is it not, for persons of the male gender - not to be a "real man." To be effeminate - to be a sissy. That, nothing cures.
I hasten to add, I'm not talking about being some kind of transsexual - though I can sympathize in general terms with those folks, and I just read today with sadness of the suicide of sportswriter Mike Penner aka Christine Daniels. Nor am I talking about any physiological oddity; all the parts are there and in good working order, trust me - though alas, at this late date subject like all other parts of the body to the creeping, damnable infirmities that come with age.
No, I'm talking about being an ordinary little gay boy who was a sissy and still is, and though he has learned through years and years of imitation and practice to more or less "butch it up" in public, still feels utterly lacking inside of some essential "manly" quality. Though time has softened the ache deep within - time does not heal every wound; some it simply wraps in bandages - it's still there, tender and throbbing if I uncover it. So after I tell my story, for whatever it's worth, I ask you to be gentle in your responses.
I've told this story - with halting words, many tears, gasping for breath - to a dozen people over the years, and it was extremely hard to do each time. It would be easier to admit to murder, rape, or theft than to admit to not being a man. Most of those people were therapists of one stripe or another; a few were very close friends.
And not one of them - not one of them, even the so-called professionals - was able to understand, to fully grasp what I was telling them. The uniform response from all of them, even close friends who had more opportunity to know me in depth than some therapists, was either: a) oh, that's not true; or b) that doesn't matter.
But it is true, and it does matter. Terribly.
To have this gaping hole at the center of your being. Bridge out. No passage. To feel forever incomplete, disconnected, impaired and imperfect deep inside: like the Scarecrow with the stuffing knocked out of him.
That is what it's like to be a Not-Man. To be some other kind of being, in a world where only being a Man is valid and admissible.
That's what it's like to be me.
Okay, I have to take a break now, guys. This is some hard shit to write. I'll try to continue later.
Becoming a Not-Man, part 1
FdeF's posts that I linked to yesterday, about growing up gay and terrified by the Church are spurring me to get around to sharing a bit of my history I've been thinking about doing for some time. I hesitate, first because it's painful to revisit scenes of cruelty and torment in one's life.
And second, because I really don't want to have to slap some silly-ass, smart-aleck anonymous commenter who might drop in and proceed to preen themselves by telling me exactly where I went wrong in my life, and why, and how, and how much better, oh so much better, they have done, would do, could do, will do. But I suppose that's the risk you take with blogging.
Anyway, I want to share my story with you guys, my Truckbuddies, triffling as it may be in the scheme of the universe, because by sharing our stories we affirm one another's experience, we validate each other's humanity. And then too, it's important to tell these stories as a witness to the world, a record for posterity. To speak the truth, in a world where lies too often inundate and suppress it.
So for whatever it's worth, I'll try to share what was the crucial, defining experience of my life, still to this day. I'm sure it's pretty much the same story millions of other gay men can tell; this is just my particular edition of it. If it speaks to you and your experience, I'm glad. If you're just passing through the Blue Truck, and the story doesn't grab you, and you think you can tell a better one, why then you just keep right on going, buddy, and write your own blog - but don't piss on mine.
This may take several posts. It's really too late at night here to embark on the whole thing. So for right now, as a starting point I'm going to post a short selection from a fine book, Becoming a Man (1992), by Paul Monette. The first half of the book, talking about his growing-up experiences in Massachusetts in the early 1960's, I think most gay men can relate to. The second half is more about his early literary career, which to me is not quite as interesting. But Monette is a powerful writer - whose voice is now sadly silent.
Here's the little passage that will serve as an epigraph to my story, just two pages:
And second, because I really don't want to have to slap some silly-ass, smart-aleck anonymous commenter who might drop in and proceed to preen themselves by telling me exactly where I went wrong in my life, and why, and how, and how much better, oh so much better, they have done, would do, could do, will do. But I suppose that's the risk you take with blogging.
Anyway, I want to share my story with you guys, my Truckbuddies, triffling as it may be in the scheme of the universe, because by sharing our stories we affirm one another's experience, we validate each other's humanity. And then too, it's important to tell these stories as a witness to the world, a record for posterity. To speak the truth, in a world where lies too often inundate and suppress it.
So for whatever it's worth, I'll try to share what was the crucial, defining experience of my life, still to this day. I'm sure it's pretty much the same story millions of other gay men can tell; this is just my particular edition of it. If it speaks to you and your experience, I'm glad. If you're just passing through the Blue Truck, and the story doesn't grab you, and you think you can tell a better one, why then you just keep right on going, buddy, and write your own blog - but don't piss on mine.
This may take several posts. It's really too late at night here to embark on the whole thing. So for right now, as a starting point I'm going to post a short selection from a fine book, Becoming a Man (1992), by Paul Monette. The first half of the book, talking about his growing-up experiences in Massachusetts in the early 1960's, I think most gay men can relate to. The second half is more about his early literary career, which to me is not quite as interesting. But Monette is a powerful writer - whose voice is now sadly silent.
Here's the little passage that will serve as an epigraph to my story, just two pages:
The passage ends: ". . . how sick with confused desire, the carnal thrill of degradation. The only reality lesson in it for me was not to be recognizably Other."
Friday, November 27, 2009
Afternoon Drive: Passionate Kisses
Mary Chapin Carpenter is my favorite female singer: an American classic.
Y'all have a good one, see you down the road.
Gay Twins
Interesting stuff. Take note, however, that nothing is as yet proven: pay attention to all the times "may" and "might" are used.
And in any case, whatever the ultimate "cause" of gayness is, even when we find out - does it really, truly matter? We are human beings. We live, we love, we laugh, we work; we have our particular contribution to give to the life of the world. Like every other mother's son on this planet.
Beyond that, what else matters? Every flower that blooms adds its small touch of beauty to the world before it withers into dust. Every bird arcing through the sky has its little song to sing before it falls, as it must one day, to earth.
Life is short. We are all given a moment out of eternity to live and bloom and sing our song before we return to dust. Science and knowledge are important, don't mistake me; but even more important is to live a decent, compassionate, unselfish life in the concert of humanity.
To add our warbled note, however tiny, however frail, to the beautiful, mysterious aria of Love that proceeds from the heart of things: that's why we're here.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
All Good Boys Go to Hell
Truckbuddy FdeF has written a fine series of moving posts about the religious terrors and tortures of growing up gay in a hateful, homophobic church. Your Head Trucker was never a Catholic but I was and am a sissy boy; FdeF sounds like my twin. Go read.
An excerpt:
An excerpt:
Until then, being a sissy meant that I might be a failure in gym class but I could at least be a relatively good Catholic boy. Learn prayers in Latin, imitate the Saints, turn the other cheek. But it became more and more inescapable that who I was, was among the most despised, vile and hated of humans, to be rejected, not pitied. Who I was, deep inside, was a sin. It was not just my sexual release that was sinful; it was my very identity, my being, which was unforgivable.Can you relate?
My religion was singling me out, making me sit on the bench when everyone else was in the game. My religion may as well have been calling me a faggot and making damn certain that everyone knew it. I was unforgivable and pathetic. I could not not sin. I had only a vague sense of this fusion identity; it was like telling a lefty that it was a sin to do anything with the left hand and expecting him or her to be just like all the righties. This reality began to resonate to my very core, referencing every perception, experience, thought.
Silence Equals Death
David Mixner:
Just trash. Disposable. Forgettable.
No matter how kind, how good, how talented, how intelligent, how selfless they might be. None of that counts, none of that matters. They are still just the turds of the human race. So the Bible says.
Sullivan quotes some blogger whose ideas ultimately come from the same place: gay unions are "a relationship based upon a sexual act which can never rise above entertainment." Notice how that statement denies us any share whatsoever in humanity: all our lives and all our works and all our loves are boiled down, reduced to mere sex; and that sex is worth less to the world than a dog's.
Now I know some of my gay brothers and sisters have found ingenious ways to interpret the Scriptures in a gay-friendly way - and God knows, like Jacob with the angel, I wrestled and struggled a long, long time with all that myself. But lexicons and grammars and creative etymology aside, there is not the slightest bit of evidence that down through all the long centuries of belief, the Jewish or the Christian communities ever once granted gay people any breathing room, a place to stand, a miniscule hope of approval or tolerance, let alone acceptance.
Until the modern gay rights movement began forty years ago, we have always been on the taboo list. But Jews and Christians alike have, over the last century or so, found ways to reconcile their faith with the idea that women are not mere appendages and subordinates to men; also, with scientific discoveries about the creation and operation of the universe; and also, with the equal rights and dignity of non-white, non-European peoples.
And certainly, the Scriptural taboos against premarital sex and divorce, as well as some churches' teachings about contraception and abortion, straight people have merrily discarded or ignore at will. If you brought the Scriptural prohibitions up to them on these matters, they would laugh and say, Oh well, after all, you can't expect us modern-day people to live according to those outdated, antiquated rules. Hmm, how very convenient their thinking is, when it suits their purpose. They ignore or reinterpret the Bible just as they please.
So they can damn well drop all the bullshit preaching against gay people too. We have a life to live, and a right to live, just as much as any other human beings on this planet. There is nothing intrinsically evil about loving the same sex; it's just one more happy variation of human existence, a very natural and normal part of the glorious multiform variety of life: as much so as all the different kinds and colors of flowers, trees, and animals.
And yet those horrible, life-denying scriptures and sermons create, have long created, a poisonous atmosphere and prejudice against us: when it all trickles down into the minds of the ignorant and violent, it literally kills us.
No more. I used to think, Well I have to respect someone else's sincere religious convictions. No. Gays are hanged in places like Iran, or hunted down by gangs to be tortured to death in the most gruesome ways: all of which is based on sincere religious convictions. Punks and thugs who bash and murder gays in the West may not be consciously religious - but their hatred and viciousness is a direct outgrowth of the churches' antagonism towards us all these many centuries.
When Europeans began to colonize the New World, the native populations were hunted down, slaughtered, or stripped of their wealth and culture, turned into slaves and serfs, all in the name of God; "Holy" popes and "Most Christian" kings directed, authorized, and approved all that. In the English colonies, the Church of England and others were very, very late coming to the anti-slavery side; by their silence and tacit approval, they encouraged the enormous misery of the slave trade for a couple of centuries.
Until finally some decent-minded church people - not the leadership, oh no - of good conscience and clear vision stood up and said, No more. This is wrong. All men are brothers. Nobody should be treated this way. Enough.
Now, in our time, is the moment to say about gays and all the other "queer," unwanted, untolerated folk: Enough. No more hate. No more death. No more silence.
Nobody gets a pass anymore on the excuse, Oh well that's my belief, that's what I was taught, that's how I was raised.
Bullshit.
Churches in the Southern United States with few exceptions actively supported slavery and preached in favor of it until the Civil War finally settled the matter for good. Bible-believing Christians all over the South in my childhood stood on Scripture in their defense of segregation, with many solid arguments taken right out of the Bible. But that kind of thinking, even if it were built on a mountain of Bibles, is simply no longer respected, no longer accepted, by any decent-minded person. No more so than the idea that the world is flat.
Granny may have waved her fan and harrumphed and heaved her lace-covered bosom over the idea that the "niggers" were going to the same Heaven she was so sure of entering. But no matter how pious and proud and prayerful Granny was, she was just dead fucking wrong on the subject.
And so are the hateful homophobes running some churches today, about the gay thing. You buddy boys were wrong about the blacks, you were wrong about women, you were wrong about native Americans - and you are so damn wrong about the gays.
And if there is a God, you will stand in judgment for all the death and destruction and hate you've caused, if you don't sincerely repent. You want me to quote you chapter and verse on that?
And even if there is no God, who the fuck are you to rain on my parade, piss on my life, deny me the same liberty and happiness you enjoy? Fuck you, and your nasty little handpuppet-god too.
The greatest sin is to look another human being in the face and say, "You are not human, you are no part of me, you have no right to exist." Those who do - in the name of God - are drawing damnation down upon themselves, and nobody else.
"With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." "What you have done to the least of these my brothers, you have done to Me." "Judge not, that ye be not judged."
What goes around, comes around.
What I say: If you take your Bible straight out of the bottle, the inescapable conclusion from Leviticus and the Pauline letters is that gay people have no right to exist. The plain meaning of the words cannot be any clearer: "they shall be put to death" . . . "they will not inherit the Kingdom of God."Not since Matthew Shepard was crucified on a fence in Wyoming has there been such a brutal hate crime as the recent one in Puerto Rico. Young, handsome and vibrant [Jorge] Steven Lopez Mercado was vicious killed, decapitated, dismembered, set afire and left like garbage along a road. He was only 19 years old and from family reports was one of the most kind, thoughtful and humorous teenagers around. Sunday, thousands around the country held vigils in his memory determined that this not just be one more horrific hate crime chalked up on some cold statistic chart. . . .
As established institutions such as the Catholic and Morman churches have escalated their rhetoric and actions in order to stop civil marriage equality, their words have fallen on disturbed minds. When careless words are thrown around in order to prove a personal religious viewpoint, they have consequences. . . .
Of course they will throw up their hands and proclaim loudly that their spiteful words had no impact on the increase in particularly brutal hate crimes. After all, they love the sinner but hate the sin. Gandhi said that we have to measure our words as much as our actions. . . .
Equally disturbing is the lack of outrage from the straight community. Where is the Conference of Catholic Bishops condemning the death of this young teenager in Puerto Rico? Where are the Cardinals and Bishops as more and more young die horrible deaths because of hate? Where are the Mormans at the vigils in honor of young Mercado? Where are they? Where is their leadership? After all, if they have no responsibility for the deaths, then they certainly have the responsibility to speak out against such outrages.
Just in case those religious leaders who are forceful in their words against marriage equality didn't know, silence equals death and more death and more death.
Just trash. Disposable. Forgettable.
No matter how kind, how good, how talented, how intelligent, how selfless they might be. None of that counts, none of that matters. They are still just the turds of the human race. So the Bible says.
Sullivan quotes some blogger whose ideas ultimately come from the same place: gay unions are "a relationship based upon a sexual act which can never rise above entertainment." Notice how that statement denies us any share whatsoever in humanity: all our lives and all our works and all our loves are boiled down, reduced to mere sex; and that sex is worth less to the world than a dog's.
Now I know some of my gay brothers and sisters have found ingenious ways to interpret the Scriptures in a gay-friendly way - and God knows, like Jacob with the angel, I wrestled and struggled a long, long time with all that myself. But lexicons and grammars and creative etymology aside, there is not the slightest bit of evidence that down through all the long centuries of belief, the Jewish or the Christian communities ever once granted gay people any breathing room, a place to stand, a miniscule hope of approval or tolerance, let alone acceptance.
Until the modern gay rights movement began forty years ago, we have always been on the taboo list. But Jews and Christians alike have, over the last century or so, found ways to reconcile their faith with the idea that women are not mere appendages and subordinates to men; also, with scientific discoveries about the creation and operation of the universe; and also, with the equal rights and dignity of non-white, non-European peoples.
And certainly, the Scriptural taboos against premarital sex and divorce, as well as some churches' teachings about contraception and abortion, straight people have merrily discarded or ignore at will. If you brought the Scriptural prohibitions up to them on these matters, they would laugh and say, Oh well, after all, you can't expect us modern-day people to live according to those outdated, antiquated rules. Hmm, how very convenient their thinking is, when it suits their purpose. They ignore or reinterpret the Bible just as they please.
So they can damn well drop all the bullshit preaching against gay people too. We have a life to live, and a right to live, just as much as any other human beings on this planet. There is nothing intrinsically evil about loving the same sex; it's just one more happy variation of human existence, a very natural and normal part of the glorious multiform variety of life: as much so as all the different kinds and colors of flowers, trees, and animals.
And yet those horrible, life-denying scriptures and sermons create, have long created, a poisonous atmosphere and prejudice against us: when it all trickles down into the minds of the ignorant and violent, it literally kills us.
No more. I used to think, Well I have to respect someone else's sincere religious convictions. No. Gays are hanged in places like Iran, or hunted down by gangs to be tortured to death in the most gruesome ways: all of which is based on sincere religious convictions. Punks and thugs who bash and murder gays in the West may not be consciously religious - but their hatred and viciousness is a direct outgrowth of the churches' antagonism towards us all these many centuries.
When Europeans began to colonize the New World, the native populations were hunted down, slaughtered, or stripped of their wealth and culture, turned into slaves and serfs, all in the name of God; "Holy" popes and "Most Christian" kings directed, authorized, and approved all that. In the English colonies, the Church of England and others were very, very late coming to the anti-slavery side; by their silence and tacit approval, they encouraged the enormous misery of the slave trade for a couple of centuries.
Until finally some decent-minded church people - not the leadership, oh no - of good conscience and clear vision stood up and said, No more. This is wrong. All men are brothers. Nobody should be treated this way. Enough.
Now, in our time, is the moment to say about gays and all the other "queer," unwanted, untolerated folk: Enough. No more hate. No more death. No more silence.
Nobody gets a pass anymore on the excuse, Oh well that's my belief, that's what I was taught, that's how I was raised.
Bullshit.
Churches in the Southern United States with few exceptions actively supported slavery and preached in favor of it until the Civil War finally settled the matter for good. Bible-believing Christians all over the South in my childhood stood on Scripture in their defense of segregation, with many solid arguments taken right out of the Bible. But that kind of thinking, even if it were built on a mountain of Bibles, is simply no longer respected, no longer accepted, by any decent-minded person. No more so than the idea that the world is flat.
Granny may have waved her fan and harrumphed and heaved her lace-covered bosom over the idea that the "niggers" were going to the same Heaven she was so sure of entering. But no matter how pious and proud and prayerful Granny was, she was just dead fucking wrong on the subject.
And so are the hateful homophobes running some churches today, about the gay thing. You buddy boys were wrong about the blacks, you were wrong about women, you were wrong about native Americans - and you are so damn wrong about the gays.
And if there is a God, you will stand in judgment for all the death and destruction and hate you've caused, if you don't sincerely repent. You want me to quote you chapter and verse on that?
And even if there is no God, who the fuck are you to rain on my parade, piss on my life, deny me the same liberty and happiness you enjoy? Fuck you, and your nasty little handpuppet-god too.
The greatest sin is to look another human being in the face and say, "You are not human, you are no part of me, you have no right to exist." Those who do - in the name of God - are drawing damnation down upon themselves, and nobody else.
"With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." "What you have done to the least of these my brothers, you have done to Me." "Judge not, that ye be not judged."
What goes around, comes around.
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