“Dear God, sorry to disturb you, but I feel that I should be heard loud and clear. We all need a big reduction in amount of tears. And all the people that you made in your image, see them fighting in the street, ‘cause they can’t make opinions meet about God – I can’t believe in you.”
This lyric from XTC’s seminal call to practical atheism “Dear God” from the 1986 album Skylarking is tilting at the windmills in my mind as the news of the day drops its bird shit on my mixing of metaphors and allusions involving aging reference points. But we’re moving backward. You want religious freedom, fundies? You already have it. Stop messing with our freedom to avoid you, especially on the taxpayer dime.
It’s an April Tuesday in 2016, some 30 years after that Andy Partridge tirade, and we’ve just endured yet another so-called religious freedom act making its way into the law books. This time, in the wake of North Carolina’s cut-from-the-same-conservative-model-bill-cloth, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant has made rabble-rousing headlines for himself by signing a potentially more dangerous bill into law than that which has already killed the business prospects and reputation of North Carolina over the past few weeks. On the very day that I write this missive to you, dear reader, businesses like PayPal and Lionsgate are packing their bags and leaving Dixie for more hospitable grounds. Even Georgia had the sense to succumb to the mighty dollar and veto a similar measure after Disney, Marvel and Salesforce.com threatened to exit. It turns out that these sad wheezes of “religious” reaction to gains in LGBT culture and politics are resonating, but they may not be resonating enough. The message that is being carried and
projected by state legislatures and religious groups is retaining its entitled tone, knocking down the psychological states of the kids growing up beneath these thinly veiled hate pieces and creating, is clearly one of exclusion. This is why your kids commit suicide.
How do I know? Because my former partner (husband) of 11 years did just that four years ago this week after being shamed into pretending he was something he wasn’t, all the while picking up the pieces of a southern family much less intelligent, much less resourceful, much less beautiful than he was. I blame Georgia. I blame the south. I blame his family. When weak, I blame myself for not knowing more. I’ve perused the artifacts of his broken mind, only to find that he was never given a ground to stand on, that he was tortured by religious overstatement and the various snake dances that occupy only the most closed of minds. These clouds, Dear God, these ancient scriptures of stoning and stupidity are not the stuff of life; they are the stuff of discrimination and humiliation. You’re not helping anyone, God. And, by proxy, nor are you, religious zealots.
But these rhetorical fireworks aren’t going to fix anything. With any luck, the courts will. This is, in no uncertain terms, retaliation from the bigot brigade for what they consider to be a challenge to their collective purity. Vigilance is needed now more than ever. Not everyone wants to marry, but everyone does want to be treated fairly.
It’s striking how real the quieter message was in our fight to get here over the last decade; that money and influence – “disposable income,” we used to say – would provide the weight to pull society to the right side of history. And we at Watermark, as an LGBT organization, applaud the business outcry that has come in response.
All of this might sound a little heavy coming from the early innards of an issue with an actual male ass on its cover, but trust me when I tell you that sometimes the coincidences come just at the right time. We’re throwing shade, intentionally. Throughout this issue, you’ll find many stories of victories, precious small victories (like LGBT birth certificates and pride parades), that are here to remind you of the lightness and the heaviness of our time. You’ll see stories about films and plays that are meant to divert while simultaneously inform. You’ll catch some political invective, but nothing to match that which is being thrown in our LGBT faces every day.
What you won’t find is discrimination or any allegiance to a religious sect that seeks to have us dead, both at home and abroad. If there’s one thing we do believe in …
It’s you.
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