Me.

I just had a server at a restaurant make a point to tell me that God is real and loves me more than I could ever know. I guess sitting by myself and reading counts as a provocative conversation-starter if I have the temerity to read The God Delusion where other people can see.

Look at me, flaunting my atheism. I'm no better than those women who hold hands with their wives, or men who meet their husbands for lunch. Look at me being a freak and flaunting it front of the normals, oh no.

Oh, the pushy preachiness of not hiding. I think that theism is pretty questionable on a lot of levels, but I wouldn't pause in the performance of my job duties to lecture somebody reading theological trash like the Left Behind series. Why? Because believe it or not, simply being willing to be seen publicly as a believer or nonbeliever is not the same as inviting a theological debate.

This entry started as a comment on this entry about what "Progressive Christian" actually means. It's a subject about which I've given a lot of thought, and I've held this opinion for a pretty long time before being willing to say anything about it. There's a lot that I believe that I'm unwilling to say, for fear of alienating people who would otherwise be my allies.

Isn't that silly? Once I really looked at it, I realized what a condescending and nasty thing that is for me to think about my moderate theist friends. If you learn what I really think, you'll stop caring whether the courts blame rape victims, whether our judicial system executes an inordinate number of mentally-challenged and black or latino convicts, or whether gays ever have equal contractual rights in this country. You'll stop fighting with me if you hear the things that I didn't want to hear back when I was a theist.

I didn't, though. When I was a theist, I listened. Eventually. Brian can attest that it took a lot of time and patience on both of our parts before we came to a meeting-place on the question, but I didn't abandon the people and causes I cared about, so I'm going to trust the people reading this not to do it either.

( Cut for fragile things. )

Dear homophobes who have "lots of gay friends whom they love and respect": Would it be a betrayal of my gay friends if I believed they should have fewer rights than I do as a straight person? I believe it would. Would they be justified in considering me less than a true friend, because I don't respect them enough to value their freedom? I believe they would.

If you don't believe in gay marriage, then all that should mean is you won't be getting one. If you call your gay friends sinners, perverts, deviants, freaks, or an affront to God, then let me tell you. Not only are you not friends, you don't know what the hell a friend is.

I cannot stand when gay-hating zealots suddenly call up the ideal of open-mindedness as a shield. No, you guys, I don't need to be accepting and open-minded when it comes to a view that you are actively attempting to shove onto other people. I can be accepting and open-minded and supportive of your personal choices, but once you start trying to limit the rights of others? Hell no, your view doesn't deserve my tolerance and good will just for being there. Pack up your sense of entitlement and get offa my yard.

All views are not equally worthy of respect, and views which do not allow for tolerance should not be heard later crying for it when they're criticized by the ones who ARE willing to "live and let live."

I am not intolerant for saying there is no supportable rational reason to limit the contractual rights of gay people, and your gay friends are not intolerant for deciding they don't want to be around someone like you who is constantly passing judgement on a life that you openly wish you controlled instead of them. You don't deserve tolerance, you don't deserve acceptance, and you don't deserve empathy.

"Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." -Perosteck Balveda

Sincerely,

Those of us who actually know how to be a friend, those of us who know what "agree to disagree" means, and those of us who don't want to hear about tolerance from people who want their intolerance to have the weight of law.

A lot of people I know hold the (in my opinion, rather unnecessarily extreme) position that nobody needs to own guns, and that things would be better if nobody did. These people are usually the sorts of well-meaning leftists that I agree with on damn near everything else.

However.

Here are the facts: I don't need some middle-class, white, nominally-Christian straight man telling me that I am safe without a gun. What does he know? Does he live with a target on his back because he's a woman? Because I do. Does he live with a target on his back because he's an ethnic or religious minority? No? Because I do, at least in the latter case. Does he live with a target on his back because there are seriously people in this country arguing we should burn fags not flags? Does he live with a target on his back because he's poor and nobody cares what happens to poor people?

Then why in the world should I let him look me in the eye and tell me that I'll be okay without a knife in my pocket? Without a gun in my bedside table? He lives in a completely different universe than I do, a universe in which nothing about him screams, "If you brutalize me, nobody will care."

I don't want to hear from that guy that I don't need a gun. Let him live in a world where a glance, a word, or a gesture can be a threat, and then he can tell me when I should feel safe, and what I should need to make that happen.

After all, what could possibly be scarier to the gay-hating misogynist theocrats who want people like me to disappear than the idea of gays with guns? It's been suggested that this is the real reason why people are afraid to have gays serve openly in the military: the potential horror of a half dozen men with M16s turning around and asking, "Who you callin' a faggot?"

Newsflash to the TEA Party: Middle-class straight Christian white people aren't the ones under siege. It's us.

Gun rights for everybody means for me, even if it means I'm protecting myself against the racist paranoid conspiracy theorists in the NRA who fought hardest for those rights in the first place. Thanks, guys. Now stay off my goddamn lawn.

Evidently complaining about racism, homophobia, and misogyny is just as bad as complaining about black people, gays, and women. Solution: refuse to have a problem with anything ever. Safe! (Bonus points for silencing minorities who don't realize yet that anger makes them bad people. TOP SCORE.)

I am really tired of being called angry and hateful because I have the gall to dislike the people who feed a system that shits on me (and several other sorts of people who may or may not be a lot like me) every day. I am particularly bothered by all the "bullying" language being thrown around. Here's what I feel is happening (and this is just my perception, but since it's coloring my reactions, I feel obligated to explain it).

A lot of people have a "zero tolerance" view of disliking other people the way that my junior high had a "zero tolerance" policy toward fighting. I ran afoul of this policy, and I think that the way it played out says a lot about how I approach these situations.

I was being bullied by a girl who not only followed me around the halls, but cornered me for what was clearly going to be a fight. It didn't come to that, but the administrators told both of us that fighting is wrong, wanted both of us to apologize, and we both got a suspension for in-school violence.

Seeing the connection? For those who aren't catching it, I'll beat the dead horse. Sometimes it isn't right to paint all parties to a conflict as though they are all equally wrong and all equally bad and all equally to blame for the situation. There are situations where this is the case, but they are far more rare than a lot of people would like to think.

The people who treat hatred of homophobia as though it were as bad as hating gay people, the people who treat revulsion toward racism as though it were as bad as revulsion toward other races, and the people who treat bitterness at misogyny as though it were as bad as bitterness toward women? They are doing to marginalized people what my school administrators did to me when I was a kid, and I don't stand for it now.

Just because there's a conflict doesn't mean everybody involved is a bad person, and just because someone finally hits back doesn't mean they're just as much of a bully as the person who's been brutalizing them all along. Conflating these two things is not only logically screwy, but it only serves to shame and silence people who are trying to finally stand up for themselves.

So yeah, I'll say it. I mistrust conservatives, mainly social conservatives. I mistrust social conservatives because people who identify that way have tried in many identifiable and clear ways to make my life less fulfilling than theirs, because I belong to several classes of people who have faced identical objections over and over to our desires to live as equal citizens in this country (whether it's my voting rights as a woman, my right to be free from religious coercion as an atheist, or my right to equal contractual rights when it comes to civil marriages).

My dislike is different from that of homophobes, religious zealots, or sexists, or racists, because I am not trying to deny them any rights except for their perceived right to hurt me. That means the roots of our dislike, as well as our intended aims, are not just a totally different animal, they're a whole world apart.

Every time somebody equates the two, calling both me and the people who hurt me "bullies," I kind of want to bite them in the face.

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You know what's horrible? This isn't the original question. I discovered this when I went to answer it. The question was something along the lines of, "What would you do if you found out your partner had had a sex change before you met?" But now it's all about what you'd do if they have a crime in their past.

The layers of transphobia here make me go :( so hard that I don't even feel like picking through them all. You know what I'm thinking.


Edit: innerbrat has a good entry here, including what they reported. I'm just really glad I'm not the only person who noticed this. Blah.

The National Day of Silence is a day to give a nod to the silence that LGBT people--particularly students--have to live with for fear of bullying, harassment, and even violence. They have to be silent every day of their lives, so today their allies are silent just for one day.

I've done the Day of Silence for a few years now, and it didn't seem like a big thing to me until one of my gay friends realized that I was deliberately not talking, was surprised, and then gave me what might be the most heartfelt thanks I've ever received from anybody. That kind of stopped me in my tracks, because I had to wonder how much shit has she gotten from people, how alone has she been made to feel, that me not talking for a day has such a huge impact for her?

Since then, I've always tried to do this thing. I didn't realize it meant so much, and I still probably don't really "get it," but if it helps, then it's the least I can do, y'know?

"The one bonus of not lifting the ban on gays in the military is that the next time the government mandates a draft we can all declare homosexuality instead of running off to Canada." ~Lorne Bloch

So pissed.

From reannon.

Iowa, we were so proud of you. Now two Republican state reps have proposed to EXCLUDE LGBT kids from the Safe Schools law that protects kids from harassment and bullying. What. The. Fuck. It's right here: the bill itself.

What bothers me more is the utter lack of news coverage. It's all on the blogs. Come on, Iowa newspapers! I realize TV's been on Super Bowl for the last three days, but you still have pages to fill!

Windschitl, the guy who started this, is part of Iowa's "Liberty Agenda." (He also looks about 12 years old. It has brilliantly camouflaged itself by putting two conservative-friendly and fairly inoffensive ideas around this: "Allow Iowans to vote on the definition of marriage." The other two are "restore the number of state troopers to pre-1998 levels" and "the Iowa Good Neighbor Act," which lets neighbors and grandparents watch kids after school without registering as day care providers.

Iowa Pride Network has more. This is the sort of thing that sneaks in under the radar, guys. Iowans, wanna shout some? Clearly no one's hearing yet.

*tears her hair out*