Religious Frauds Hate and Fear People Who Are Different
LGBTQ rights, otherwise known as gay rights, had some advances in 2022, but overall, worldwide, the struggle continues. The rights of people who are not hetero are on the decline in countries where fascism is on the rise. You know, like the United States.
Kermit the Frog is a puppet beloved by millions of children. Kermit’s theme song, so to speak, is entitled It’s Not Easy Being Green. Lots of kids who don’t fit society’s mold, can relate to Kermit’s struggle with being different.
It’s Not Easy Being Queer, either, as countless members of the world’s LGBTQ community can attest.
Same-sex relationships have been a fact of life since humans formed communities.
Same-sex relationships were not an issue when the Greeks and Romans ruled the civilized world.
The Middle Ages Blossoming of Homosexual Hostility
Homosexuality became a taboo when the Catholic Church and Christianity began to dominate politics and culture in the Middle Ages. Burning gays at the stake was a favorite Middle Ages punishment for being queer.
The Old Testament tells the legend of God’s supposed destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as punishment for homosexual relations.
The book of Leviticus, also in the Old Testament, says homosexuals should be put to death for their sins against nature.
Yet, homophobic persecution through the ages did nothing to stop homosexuality or the equivalent of drag shows. In the 1770s, English drag queens would gather in places called Macaroni rooms, while other gays frequented Molly Houses for hook-ups and socializing.
Lesbians with money sometimes lived together in so-called Boston marriages.
But discrimination and demonization of gays, mainly by so-called Christian heterosexuals, have continued through the ages, even when gays have been heroes.
Gay War Heroes
In the American Revolutionary War a Prussian military officer named Friedrich von Steuben is credited with teaching the American revolutionaries how to behave and fight as military men. Von Steuben was openly gay.
Alan Turing didn’t fare as well in World War Two, even though he’s credited with saving 21 million lives.
Turing, a gay British technology whiz, secretly invented the world’s first digital programmable computer.
Turing’s computer cracked the Enigma code, Germany’s encrypted military messaging system. The Allies were able to read Nazi military messages and react, thereby saving millions of lives.
The Imitation Game, a 2014 film about Turing, showed how the British police arrested and harassed Turing because he was gay. He was sentenced to 12 months of “hormone therapy” to cure his homosexuality.
The “therapy” consisted of chemical castration. Turing, one of the true heroes of the Second World War, committed suicide in 1954 at age 41.
In the recent past, the term “in the closet” came to mean gays keeping their sexual orientation hidden from society.
Movie stars like Rock Hudson went to great lengths to conceal their homosexuality, even though it was often an open secret.
The Night Things Changed
The in-the-closet mentality suddenly changed on a hot July night in 1969. That’s when New York police raided a popular gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.
In those days police raids of gay bars were almost routine, but the raid on the Stonewall Inn lit a match of protest.
The Stonewall Inn raid led to riots,
which prompted protest marches that didn’t stop.
They led to the formation of the Gay Liberation Front. Many gays and lesbians stepped out of the closet and into public and started demanding equal treatment under the law.
Just like the Middle Ages, many so-called Christians do not approve of rights for gays and see it as the beginning of the end of the world:
So-Called Christians and Homosexual Hate
(Here is televangelist Pat Robertson warning God will inflict nuclear Armageddon on the U.S. if homosexuals have rights)
“This is a devastating blow to religious freedom and to the sanctity of America. If you want to bring the judgment of God on this nation, you just keep this stuff up.”
They’re going to make you conform to them. You’re going to say you like anal sex, you like oral sex, you like bestiality, you like anything you can think of, whatever it is, and sooner or later you’re going to have to conform your religious beliefs to the group of some aberrant thing. It won’t stop at homosexuality.”
Pat Robertson is, perhaps, the highest profile conservative preacher promoting fear and hatred of the queer community. But he’s not the only one. If you think I’m picking on so-called Christians, pick on this:
“The Bible’s agin it, God’s agin it, I’m agin it, and if you’ve got any sense, you’re agin it.”—Pastor Charles Worley, Providence Rd. Baptist Church, Maiden, N.C.
“Now to me, LGBT stands for Let God Burn Them.” —Pastor Steven Anderson, Faithful Word Baptist Church, Tempe, AZ
“They should be sentenced to death. They should be lined up against the wall, and shot in the back of the head.” —Pastor Dillon Awes, Steadfast Baptist Church, Wautauga, TX
In 2016, 49 people were murdered, another 53 wounded at the gay-oriented Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The killer was Omar Mateen, a Muslim supporter of the terrorist group ISIS: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Fundamentalist Muslims, which describes most Middle Eastern terrorists, are murderously hostile to homosexuals.
Being gay in public sometimes comes at a price. The potential for danger for LGBTQ people never ends no matter where they live.
Last year, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a young man named Anderson Lee Aldrich who one neighbor described as a gay-hating homophobe, killed five and wounded 17 others when he allegedly shot up the Q nightclub. Aldrich was stopped by two patrons who disarmed and beat him.
The Ignorance of Homophobes
Homophobes, many of them religious fundamentalists, are usually ignorant about the nature of homosexuality and the gay lifestyle.
A lot of them are terrified it might be contagious.
To ensure homophobia strikes terror in the hearts of the faithful and the ignorant, the so-called Christian Right promotes fear that homosexuals are recruiting heterosexual children.
They call it grooming: the notion that gays and lesbians will somehow lure otherwise heterosexual innocent kids into a life of sodomy and deviant sex.
The Pizzagate Follies
That’s how we wound up with 2016’s Pizzagate: a radical Right conspiracy rumor that Hillary and Bill Clinton and other big-name Democrats were running a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of Comet, a suburban Washington pizza parlor.
Comet has no basement. No Basement! But that didn’t faze the conspiracy mongers who were convinced it was ground zero for a pedophile ring.
Pizzagate has no evidence, no witnesses, no facts of any kind. But that doesn’t trouble right-wing homophobes.
Vote-grubbing politicians, recognizing so-called Christian evangelicals and fundamentals are a gold-mine of gullible anti-gay politics, have jumped on the gay-bashing bandwagon.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, described as a Donald Trump mini-me without the charm, has fanned the flames of homophobia with Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, which forbids the discussion of gender orientation in the state’s schools.
Donald Trump, who desperately wants to be President again and sees DeSantis in his rear-view mirror, is stepping up attacks against the gay community:
“We’re gonna stop the Left Wing radical racists and perverts who are trying to indoctrinate our youth. And we’re going to get their Marxist hands off of our children.” (Applause) We’re going to defeat the cult of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders called men and women.” (Applause)
A Theory of Why the Right Hates Drag Shows
There have been over 100 anti-gay bills introduced in state legislatures so far in 2023. Last year over 340 such blatantly discriminatory bills were submitted. Many of the proposed laws target drag shows, where men dress up as women.
Political commentator Armanda Marcotte speculates conservatives despise drag queens because they imitate Western women by wearing makeup.
In the hetero world, lipstick, eyeliner and blush denote who has power and who doesn’t.
Marcotte thinks make-up-wearing, gender-bending drag queens are a threat to the established rules of the conservative patriarchy. They challenge the hetero-male-dominated power structure.
Fearful, ignorant, patriarchal homophobes see all lesbians, gays, bi-sexuals and transgender people as caricatures.
They don’t consider that that community includes people like Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple.
Cook, who is openly gay, grew up in Alabama, one of the nation’s hotbeds of racism, bigotry and homophobia.
In a speech at Alabama’s Auburn University, Cook’s alma mater, he recalled how, as a young boy, he witnessed a cross-burning at the home of a black family:
“For me the cross burning was a symbol of ignorance, of hatred and a fear of anyone different than the majority.”
“Since these early days I have seen and I’ve experienced many other types of discrimination and all of them were rooted in the fear of people that were different than the majority.”
People who are not heterosexual: homosexuals, bi-sexuals transgenders or anyone who doesn’t identify as hetero have been persecuted for thousands of years. Our times show some things never change.
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