You wrote, "So Dan, I am happy that you found churches that are welcoming same sex and the alphabet group."
First, don't call us queer people by that insulting name. People who call us the alphabet group are almost invariably Christians who hate us for religious ressons. I wasn't going to mention it before you tried to say I was making this about myself, but ...
Look, Dan did NOT find a significant number of churches that accept queer people as fully equal, perfectly moral and decent people.
He found the opposite. I don't know how or why you so totally misunderstood what he wrote, but you did.
And your suggestion I'm making this about me isn't just insulting and dismissive, it's dead wrong.
I'm far from the only queer person in the world, you know. This isn't about me, it's about Nex Benedict, a queer 16 year old in Oklahoma bullied to death at the beginning of this month by three girls shouting anti-transgender slurs. It's about an Oklahoma state senator answering a question about Nex by declaring that Oklahoma is a moral Christian state whose Chrisian people don't want "filth like that" in the state.
It's about more than half of the Christian audience standing up to applaud and cheer the senator's evil.
And you think this is about me? You are as dead wrong about that as you are dead wrong about Dan's article being about how Christian churches accept same-sex couples.
My comments are not about me. They are about Nex Benedict. They are about Matthew Shepard, another queer youth murdered in a toxic homophobic climate nurtured and strengthened by Christianity.
My comments are about a huge spike in violent incidents against queer youth over the past several years — violence happening amid a toxic political climate in which leaders and influencers condemn queer people on explicit Christian grounds.
It's about Christian leaders going all in on that vicious bigotry.
My comments are about adult queer people, the most vulnerable of whom are trans women, most often Black women and other women of color who are increasingly being brutalized by bullies who are radicalized by Christians who hate queer people .
My comments are about my dead friends and family who passed during the worst of the AIDS crisis while Christians fought as hard they could to stop the U.S. government from spending significant national treasure on research work for effective treatment.
My late partner's and my address book that we kept in the 80s and 90s has almost half its entries lined out — entries of our friends who died of AIDS amid a horrifying Christian push to keep us dying.
My comments are not about me. I'm not selfish and self centered like that.
But I won't comment further on my own morality, because I'm not kidding when I say this isn't about me. You are wrong.
