Count Four

On Lobbying & The Blade

How scary, for once I agree with Chris Crain of the Washington Blade, in his condemnation of HRC’s anemic and ineffectual lobbying and PR policies. HRC put on a march, raised a ton of money, got a new building, and we got shafted with Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell-Don’t Pursue. They’re not doing a very good job at their supposed job (lobbying for equal rights for Gay BLT americans), and they need to be called on the carpet about it. Bravo to Crain for his efforts there.

Intolerant

Enough with tolerance, I want to be intolerant.

I don’t want to tolerate those who would discriminate against me. I don’t want to tolerate those who would harm me and mine through word or deed. I don’t want to tolerate people who spend every waking moment trying to think of ways to hold us back, or, even worse, who are indifferent to the suffering they see around them. These people don’t deserve tolerance, they deserve to be actively opposed, and told they are wrong, and fought tooth and nail at every turn.

Because if they’re not opposed, they’ll run right over us, with not even a pretense of tolerance to smooth over the destruction they’ll leave behind.

Weddings

Weddings are curious things. They’re a public celebration of a union between two persons, but they are also frequently a means by which the dominant heterosexual culture reinforces that dominance through the use of religious imagery. And as such they can be a very uncomfortable place to be if you don’t happen to fit into that particular model.

I attended an Episcopal wedding last week wherein the priest, a woman, continually invoked the divine (unsurprisingly), but also continually spoke of the union of man and woman as the sole model for relationships as that model had been set out by the divine. I suppose it was because this was the first wedding I had attended in a while, and the first after the explosion of news and progress (and setbacks) on the issue of secular gay marriage, but the whole experience was an exceedingly uncomfortable one. It was as if my entire existence were being denied, that I had no part in this plan, and that, by inference, I should not exist at all. Forget about the queers, they don’t fit into the divine plan.

Which is precisely how violence against gays and lesbians arises – through this exclusion from the norm. If they don’t fit in, if there is no place for them, then it’s okay to exclude them, or to do violence against them. The divine has shown that there is no place for their kind in “real” society, so why should we even tolerate them to live.

I don’t know that I’ll be attending many more weddings of friends. I can’t say for certain that I never will again, but if the public celebration is to be a time where I and mine are to be explicitly excluded, in spirit if not in body, they are no place for me.