Love your enemies

Okay, so I'm starting to get more clear in my head about where we gay people are and what we need to do from here on. Especially after seeing this video of a mob of big gay guys swarming the granny protester out in California yesterday. That just lost us a couple hundred thousand votes right there. Maybe forever.

Shame on you guys - yeah she's silly and misguided, and probly got a little martyr complex going on - but she's somebody's mom, for God's sake. And you know what? She's got just as much right as you do to express her opinions in public.

This is America, people. Act like it. Cursing and roughing up an old lady is not what I'm about, and you don't represent me when you do that. It's time we all grew up a little bit here.

So here's something I wrote today over on Pam's House Blend in reply to another poster who said he was upset by last week's votes and "still drowning in acid."

Love is the only way man. Hate and bitterness and all those acidic feelings won't get us anywhere.

Remember when Yugoslavia was falling apart into fifty little states? I saw a report one time, they went around to every little ethnic group and asked What's your problem with the other people.

And everybody they asked said Oh those people over there, they are awful, they're horrible, they're nasty, they did this and that . . . one guy actually said "and they all smell like onions." Sounds funny, but he was dead serious.

All that hatred, all that acid . . . nobody reached out, nobody talked, nobody tried to see the other guy's point of view. And you know what happened. Thousands and thousands of people died, and today all these little bitty countries over there, no more Yugoslavia.

I know there's more to the story, I'm just making an analogy: we absolutely cannot give in to the bitterness, we cannot repay in kind, we must absolutely forswear vengeance and retaliation and every angry deed. We have to have some humility here.

We gay people are sometimes pretty fabulous, true . . . lol . . . BUT even we are NOT the center of the universe. God or [insert divinity/ spiritual force here] loves us, yeah that's right.

But God loves THEM too. We must remember that. The world did not spring into being only for us LGBT folk. We are just one little 5 percent. They are the 95 percent. We aren't the center of the world. It behooves us to act with patience, kindness, and a deep understanding of the diversity of human life.

I'm mad too, make no mistake. A big injustice was done last week. But WE need to stop and consider: the vast majority of people probably did not vote for Prop 8 because they hate us. They voted that way because THEY feel threatened and afraid at some level. It was fear, not hate, that motivated most people. Screaming and cursing and behaving like wildeyed jackasses will not reduce their fear level, and thus will not get us the votes we need for equality.

Peaceful protests are fine - but we as a group need to simmer down just a bit and take a clear, cold, sober look at what happened and why. We need to talk with those folks who voted the other way, find out why, address those fears and concerns. They're scared of us. We need to make them less scared. Not more.

Which is all summed up this way: Love your enemies, bless them that persecute you, do good to them who despitefully use you. There's a whole lotta wisdom there that we ALL need to reflect on now.

And that's how Martin Luther King did it, isn't that right? We all need to go back and read his words, his strategies, his wisdom, and think very carefully about how we act now at this critical time in our history.

If we hate, we lose the votes; and worse than that, we lose ourselves, our decency, our humanity.

Hate and violence won't work, guys; wise up and act like men, not a bunch of nasty brats.