Thanks to Friends and Damn the Bigots

Two emotions again, and I am going to write about both. Yes, this is still about Prop 8.

After what I wrote yesterday, I could not stop thinking about all the young straight folks sitting down in the corner of death in support of the right of fags and dykes to marry. And it made me think again that the idea of gay equality has penetrated deeply into American society. I had lunch with a now retired colleague friend of mine on Monday before the election, and her husband whom I have only met once before and who was positively apoplectic at the thought that 8 might pass. They have embraced gay rights not as a sidebar but as a critical issue for the future of our society. For so many years of my life, the vast bulk of straight people I knew took my passion for gay issues as more of a lark, a peccadillo, an enthusiasm. I think that the issue of marriage, percolated through the experience of the last decade, has associated gay rights with, on the one hand, love, and on the other, the right to stable domestic happiness.

Liberal people ... which is to say people who practice in life what the Christians eschew, to whit that people should do unto others as they would have others do unto them ... have come to embrace unreservedly the notion that freedom from fear and the freedom to enjoy life in domestic joy and stability should be guaranteed to all including gay people. And they showed that on Tuesday in California. That we were overwhelmed by fear and hatred and the narrow scope of vision of those in the fearful hinterlands, that is, I suppose, par for the course. But I am the more deeply moved, the more I reflect upon it, that we engendered such a flood of acceptance and love. We may have lost a battle, but we have we have won an army who showed their genuine acceptance of our loves and our lives.

Well ... there is one noteworthy exception that needs to be called out ...

Damn the black preachers who spew hatred ... damn them. May they meet their savior who never said a word against gay people and may he personally cast them into the hellfire that is the bigotry and loathing that fouls their souls.

Damn the black preachers who foul the name of the noble struggle in whose name they pretend to act.

I heard one of this fetid lot on TV who talked about how the water cannons had never been brought out against fags. Perhaps he forgets that we would have been happy with water cannons as his coreligionists consigned us to be burned alive for so many centuries. Perhaps he forgets that his religion sent us to prison, empowered the thugs and murderers who have tormented us even to this day. Perhaps he forgets that Christianity was killing homos in Europe centuries before more than one in a hundred people even knew what a black person was.

Shame on the black preachers of hate. And shame on those who follow them. You bear upon your souls the most significant defeat for liberty in the present moment. How can you sleep at night? What would Martin Luther King, Jr., have said to you. What would your Jesus have said?

They would have shamed you. And I shame you. And every freedom-loving American shames you.

Shame on you, black preachers of hatred.

Okay, with that, I think I will stop ranting. I will try to think of something uplifting to address ... although I owe Katy a sober reflection on why I think the banning of Castro's Halloween is anti-gay, and I will get to that.