Playing for Time

The world is a cruel place for dreamers — we tend to be motivated by beauty, kindness, and justice, the biggest pipe-dream of all, and then when the world turns ugly and vicious, as it so frequently does, we don’t even know who to talk to about it.  I mean, I’m as ecumenical as the next person — bunnies and eggs and chocolate and death and whee! so fun how we’ve cleverly combined it all into a little something for everyone!   But when Easter Week coincides with the spectacle of its celebrants disenfranchising an entire chunk of society — people their religion requires them to at least proselytize* if not love — I’m finding it far more honorable to go full-on reality and identify with the original pagans.  I won’t slow you down with the details, so Google is your friend on this one.  I just think those guys didn’t line up good PR, because they actually did a ton of cool stuff and didn’t seem to hate anybody in the process.

So, now I’m seeing “Don’t worry, the Supreme Court will fix it.”  THIS Supreme Court?  You’ve observed them in operation, right?  We’ll leave that right there for now.

And filed under Things That Make Me Go WTF?!  Well, today it’s knowing that a Teabilly with three teeth, one of which is just a baby tooth stuck back in there for luck, who voluntarily smells like a rhinoceros and sleeps with his sister has, as of this week, the legal right to discriminate against, disrespect, disparage, and disgust an intentionally unprotected class of people with whom said Teabilly could not intelligently converse if his or her peapickin’ sorry little life hung by a thread on the success of that very task. And statistically it’s a given that there are gay people within the Tea Party fortress, God help them.  I’m pushing away a thought that maybe they drown them all.

And here’s something we can all file under Things That Count.  Every lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgendered person covered under this legislation is somebody’s lovey.  Because if I say somebody’s son or daughter you’ll be all “Yeah, yeah, me too, so what?”  No, you heartless jerk, every person on earth deserves to have his or her sweet guts loved out by somebody even if that somebody ends up being solely his or her self.  And more often than sometimes those somebodies are beaten to a pulp and half dead inside, a lot of it self-inflicted, before it’s real that they can love themselves that completely, and if you make a double entendre out of that you officially suck.  This whole thing is so heartbreaking — and so unnecessary for anyone to suffer through.  Once we emerged from the Dark Ages, the question of sexuality should have been a non-issue, so how do we, a supposedly intelligent, enlightened people, find ourselves still looking like frothing idiots?  Never mind, rhetorical.

One more for the Things That Count file.  A bloodbath doesn’t happen overnight, so write this down … homosexuals were among the very first to be harassed in Germany for their “inferiority,” and thousands eventually died in the camps after brutal torture ordered specifically for them.

This one’s a freebie:  If you don’t know what fascism is and you have only so much time, look it up instead of the pagans — they’ll keep.

“If fascism comes, it will not be identified with any ‘shirt’ movement, nor with an insignia, but it will probably be wrapped up in the American flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution.” 

James Waterman Wise, 1936 issue of The Christian Century

*Because if you’re gay you can’t be a Christian, you know.