The New York Times have run a wretched little sob-story sympathy article about how conservative evangelicals feel “cut off” over how their Culture Wars have gone, and by Mr. Trump’s GOP nomination. They focus on an old couple – the Odgaards of Iowa, “religious liberty ambassadors” for the Ted Cruz campaign – who decided to sell their commercial property to the fundamentalist church they attend rather than comply with anti-discrimination law.
Really. How sad.
How about how I felt “cut off” fighting their ballot initiatives criminalising me? Clearly, no one at the New York Times has any goddamn idea what that feels like, or what it’s like to go door to door arguing for my right to exist, or they wouldn’t write such lovely paeans to my vicious, unrelenting oppressors.
Hey, how about an article how queers deal with the long-term multi-impact trauma of having almost. every. single. election. of our adult lives being existential questions? Hey, New York Times, how about I how feel “abandoned” there?
How about how queers feel when this very year, Mr. Trump has promised to nominate only judges endorsed by Heritage Foundation, which thinks states should be allowed to make our existence illegal?
But no, who gives a fuck about queers, we’ve got to talk about sad ol’ Grandma and Grandpa Whitey Bigotsson. How sad they feel “cut off,” how they aren’t adequately represented by their presidential nominee! How abandoned they feel now that they can’t fucking have the state kill me.
Ever been handed a pamphlet calling for your own execution? I’ve said it before, but I have. It wasn’t even this new one from 2015, it was a previous version! They’re still making new ones!
And that is the the kind of thing Grandma and Grandpa are just fine with. That doesn’t make them feel “cut off” or “abandoned” or sad or anything! Oh, they might think that’s a little far, these days, but don’t get it wrong: that’s what they go for when they think they can get it.
I note, by the way, that both Their Guy and Mr. Trump accepted the endorsement of that pamphlet’s author, and stood on stage with him, just best buds 5eva.
But The New York Times apparently wants us to understand how sad they feel. How bereft. How “abandoned.”
“It all flipped, so fast,” said Mr. Odgaard, a patrician 70-year-old who favors khakis and boat shoes. “Suddenly, we were in the minority. That was kind of a scary feeling. It makes you wonder where the Christians went.”
They talk about the decision to sell their building to their church. How sad it is. “It’s like losing a child,” said Ms. Odgaard.
No, you know what’s like losing a child? Making your children homeless and destitute because they’re queer. Like their movement did, and still does.
Queer kids are a big, big chunk of homeless youth – last time I saw a figure, it was 40%. And it’s because their movement encourages it, with their people telling each other it’s the necessary and godly thing to do – assuming the legal torture programme known as “conversion therapy” doesn’t work out, of course.
I’ve written about this before, but I’m never letting it go – Beverly LaHaye, founder of Concerned Women for America, on her nationally-syndicated radio show through the 1990s, telling her listeners that this was critical, that they had to deprive their children of all shelter, all hope, all recourse, all home – for being queer. Listening to her console her listeners who did it, supporting them, encouraging them as they sobbed into the telephone about what was happening to their own children who they had made destitute.
That was fun to transcribe, let me fuckin’ tell you. Those kids show up on the street in Seattle, and other towns, and they’re – go figure – complete wrecks. A lot of them – a lot of them – end up dead.
I guess that’s less “losing a child” and more “killing a child,” but hey, they’re fag kids, who cares, am I right? None of that’s half as poignant as poor ol’ Grandma and Grandpa Bigotsson selling their building to the fundamentalist church they attend instead of complying with anti-discrimination law.
So “cut off.” So “abandoned.” So sad.
Good.
