seriously. just shut up.
i’m lucky. i don’t have any conservative friends or family. a few girls that teased me in high school who added me on Facebook voted for mccain and they think they’re republican because their parents are, but i have no actual friends or family that’s conservative. so, unlike a lot of people i know, i’m not logging in to Facebook or twitter or whatever other thing people are using and seeing people that i know posting photos of their chicken sandwiches they’re super proud of buying. i’ve avoided that part of it, mostly. though i do have a very christian friend who is also liberal-ish and posts things on Facebook trying to rally his bigoted christian friends and family behind his cause. a nice effort, but it’s usually met with people being really ignorant and bigoted. he always scratches his head and seems super confused that these right-wing conservative evangelicals he knows just don’t seem to have their heart in the right place [who knew?]. today he posted about how we should accept gay people.
listen. i don’t really think religious faith is logical. i think it’s weird. i think it’s delusional. but lots of people are delusional about lots of things that don’t seem to involve god. it’s all the same to me. worship whatever you want. you’re free to do so. legally. what you’re not free to do is use your religion to dictate the rights of others. because that’s wrong. it’s not a difference of opinion. it’s just wrong.
i guess what confuses me if that if i had a bigoted opinion like this, i’d be really embarrassed. i wouldn’t tweet about it or send chain emails or make tumblr posts. i’d be so embarrassed because it’s such an incorrect viewpoint to have.
i read this post over on xojane, and holy shit. this is everything i have been saying here on this blog for a very long time. what, two years or three years or something? i don’t even remember when i started it. uh oh. anyway, you should read it. because it’s funny and it’s right. maybe it doesn’t use all the language you want, but its bottom line is the same:
I don’t have to be tolerant of your beliefs if they’re evil and bad, which encouraging people to deny rights to gay people is. If religions in the United States were high school students, the “Christianity” a lot of people practice would be “the girl who’s so popular that everybody thinks is kind of dumb and mean but is nice to anyway.” I don’t need to be nice to you, Christianity, I’m not trying to get invited over to your pool.
But just being a religion does not mean I am not allowed to disagree with you. That is not “intolerance.”
What Dan Cathy did is wrong in the sense that he is “incorrect.” What he thinks of as “traditional marriage” is not actually “traditional marriage” even as it is written in the Bible, so I guess all that says about him is that he is mega dumb. Read a book on the history of marriage, Dan, you dumb stupid idiot.
But what Dan Cathy did is also wrong on a spiritual, moral level: If you publicly own up to same beliefs that cause gay kids to fear for their physical safety or actually kill themselves, you are a human sack of shit. Full stop.
i’m not required to be tolerant of these sorts of beliefs. and i’m not. there’s this problem in america where if the right does something wrong, we have to find a leftwing equivalent. sorry dudes. i believe in the freedom of religion, and i believe in the freedom of speech, but i do not believe that either of those rights gives you the right to be a giant shower of dildos. full stop.
you wanna buy a chicken sandwich to proclaim to the world ‘I AM INTOLERANT’? unfortunately, i can’t stop you. but my hope is that you will be embarrassed in the future. when your children and their children are reading in history text books that people stood in solidarity against gay rights, and your smug douche bag face is in the photo, i hope you feel the shame deep down all the way from your narrow mind down to your intolerant toes. but more than anything, i hope that you change your mind. because truly, the world needs fewer people like you.
