I’m trying to assimilate the results of November’s election … the California results.
The passage of Proposition 8, which reversed last spring’s state supreme court decision legalizing same sex marriage, came as a shock. Not that it should have, considering that the evil jackal and brilliant strategist, the Most Reverend George Niederauer, Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco, coordinated with the Mormon Grand Troglodyte in Salt Lake City to raise fifty million dollars to fund a clever and mendacious media campaign in support of the measure.
And now that that vicious scumbag has succeeded in buying legislation forcing millions of us non-Catholics to obey the rules of his church, he’s calling for everyone to “tone down the rhetoric and move on”.
The mind reels. I sent a letter to the Chron – which they published! – in which I asked His Grace a couple of questions: 1. Tell me, Your Grace, Does “toning down the rhetoric” mean that Your Grace is going to stop calling me an “objectively disordered grave threat to the family”? and 2. Would Your Grace be telling both sides to “move on” if Your Grace’s side had lost? Oh please, this is just more of the glittering hypocrisy we have come to adore in the pronouncements of the church. The churches have initiated and supported and funded every piece of anti-gay legislation in the history of this country.
But I have to be fair and admit that a pitiful handful of Christian clerics actually had the balls to speak against Proposition 8. The majority of the Episcopal leaders, in fact, were against Proposition 8. And a few others courageously spoke out. A Baptist, even, the Reverend Amos Brown, flew in the face of the overwhelming bigotry of the black churches and was harshly denounced by some of his fellow black ministers for doing so.
And yet, yet, in the face of all this hate and bigotry, I have hope. An incident in November of 2007 is illustrative.
On the way home from my road trip to Texas, I was passing through the Los Angeles area and took an exit for lunch. I blundered onto a Whole Foods, and as I was eating my sandwich at a table just beyond the checkout stations, I watched this cute checker in his twenties come on duty.
He wasn’t a flamboyant queen, but it didn’t take much nose for lavender to sense that he was gay as he came sashaying in with his cash tray and a big grin. What blew me away was that every single checker, sacker, sweeper – all the employees in sight on the floor – greeted him warmly with big smiles and cheerful greetings as he walked past them, “Hi, Jason!” “Hey, dude, how’ya doin’?” All of ’em. And not one of the others was noticeably gay.
But they were all young.
So no matter how much the old Christians and their vicious churches despise me, the hateful old bigots are dying off, and their children are much less bigoted. And their grandchildren are mostly tolerant.
And the old ‘phobes know this. That’s why they’re pouring millions of bucks into anti-gay campaigns all over the nation. That’s why they home-schooled their children or at least sent them to religious schools for indoctrination. They’re trying desperately to inculcate them with hatred and stave off the inevitable.
I won’t live to see it, but in the next few years the scales will tip. And in another couple of decades or so the United States will join western Europe in tolerance for gays. Eastern Europe will doubtless continue rotting in the clutches of Christian bigotry, hatred second only to that found in the Islamic countries. Let ’em stew in it.
Here’s a good red curtain on 18th Street:
