A reader writes…
Hey being intolerant of intolerance sounds like call for a gay run government witch hunt on bad people. Hey man, think of it Baptist Preachers and Catholic bishops locked up for saying “hateful” things. Gee, wouldn’t that be a great. Pass a couple laws and jail everybody you don’t like.
Are you smoking something? Setting up a police state to control all thought and speech has been tried in various places and at various times and it never works. It is always a bloody mess.
Better you tell folks you don’t like to kiss your ass.
I do tell folks to kiss my ass-all the time. (Hey, Robertson! Kiss my gay ass!) But I did not, and would not, call for a gay-run government. I mean, please. The only people I know who have a harder time living within their means than gay people are, well, Republicans. Two years with a gay-run government and we’d have more red ink-and shoes-than we do now.
The funny thing about your letter, dear reader, is that you accuse me of something religious people are guilty of. It’s a common tactic. Who recruits? Not the gays. It’s always Witnesses and Mormons at my door. It’s never the gays. When I walk through downtown Seattle I’m accosted by Scientologists, not lesbians.
It’s the fundies, many of them, who want to lock up gay people, not the other way around. For the record: I don’t want to lock up anybody. (Well, not anybody who doesn’t want to be locked up-and even then only for a weekend, tops.) I’m happy to live in a world where Pat Robertson is free to think I’m going to hell, and free to preach as much. I reluctantly battle Robertson because he believes the federal government should deprive me, a tax-paying fellow citizen, of my civil rights and responsibilities, even jail me, because of who I am.
Look, I’m all for free speech, I’m all for persuasion. If Pat Robertson can talk me out of being gay then, by God, I’ll give it up tomorrow. If a “Choose Life” billboard convinces a woman not to have an abortion, that’s great. The problem with Pat is that he wants to compel me to give up being gay, or, failing that, he seeks to deprive me of my civil rights because I’m gay. The problem with the anti-choice movement is that they want the law to impose their beliefs about abortion.
Why, I often wonder, can’t the religious right extend gay and lesbian Americans the same courtesy they extend to, say, adulterers? Or shrimp lovers? Yes, the gays are going to hell-it says so right there in the bible somewhere. It says we should be put to death along with the adulterers and shrimp eaters. But the adulterers and shrimp eaters don’t come in for the same degree of persecution. No attempts to strip them of their civil rights or write them out of the U.S. Constitution. And what about the Jews? They’re going to hell, along with Tom Cruise and his Scientologist pals and Lutherans (if you ask the Catholics) and the Catholics (if you ask the Lutherans). So many hell-bound sinners-and everyone else gets a pass. Fundamentalist Christians seem content merely knowing that everyone else will suffer horribly when we’re all left behind after they’ve been-what is it again? Ruptured or something? They may attempt to persuade others to join them, prior to the rupture, but there’s no attempt to actively persecute. Anyone else. Just us.
Is it too much to ask for gays and lesbians to be extended the same courtesy fundamentalist Christians seem so capable of extending to others? It’s called tolerance-the theme for the day. I’ll tolerate Pat Robertson if he’ll tolerate me. We don’t have to like each other, but we do have to share a continent-at least until the rupture.
Blah blah blah-who put a nickel in me? Just getting the gay stuff out before the clock strikes 12.
-posted by Dan.
The Dish 