There’s a crude video game recently released out there that gives players points for protecting heterosexual game characters, by shooting the faggots – the guys in pink shirts, making their heads explode in blood. Oh, yeah, and you get even more points by identifying and shooting the tranny freaks. Like my kids.
You lose points if you shoot the good heterosexuals.
Am I appalled? Of course. And while, yes, this is one person and his gleeful fans, and the big distributor dropped it after two hours (but allowed it up for two hours!) and there will always be haters, that’s a cop-out. What does appall me most is the way this attitude has been fostered, at the highest levels of our society.
“I do not construe homosexual rights as human rights.” – Chris Smith, national GOP congressman, about people being thrown in prison just for being gay
“My thoughts are that marriage is between a man and a woman. It’s a well-established, fundamental pillar of society, and no group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn’t matter what they are, they don’t get to change the definition. ” – Ben Carson, GOP Presidential Candidate (note the words “what” they are, gay or bestiality)
Florida GOPs moved an anti-transgender bathroom law forward, stating the need to keep trans folk to the bathroom for their biological sex because “Single-sex public facilities are places of increased vulnerability and present the potential for crimes against individuals using those facilities, including, but not limited to, assault, battery, molestation, rape, voyeurism, and exhibitionism”
Every single GOP Presidential candidate has spoken out against gay marriage, against gay adoption and gay foster parents – to “protect” children and people and institutions of faith.
They have framed equal rights as an attack on “normal” Americans. The LGBTQ folk are a danger and a threat.
And their colleagues have voted that way, time and again, along party lines.
This attitude encourages Americans to feel justified, even proud, of violent bigotry. They are “protecting” their church and their way of life. Sure, these candidates may say, “I never meant it to go that far” if some real person is injured or commits suicide. But with every statement, they encourage the view that LGBTQ folk are less than equal, less than human, less than worthy of protection or the life offered a straight, white, male “Christian” American.
They enable hatred. They enable violence. Their casual pandering to that viewpoint makes me feel ill for the fate of true American values of equality and justice.
I know we authors are supposed to stay out of politics. This might lose me some readers. But I have two genderqueer kids. And the Republican party, if in power, would deny them protection, in jobs or in housing, deny them the right to marry or adopt kids, force my kid who shaves every day to stick to women’s washrooms where “she” belongs. Or potentially face arrest, fines, prison.
I cannot imagine, with a clear humanitarian conscience, voting Republican in America today. I feel sad for those who wished to work from within the GOP, because you cannot work from within when every major candidate holds bigoted views. I don’t care if they could turn straw to gold and cut government paperwork in half. I don’t care what great ideas they might have. Nothing makes up for encouraging discrimination, bigotry, and hatred against your fellow citizens, simply for who they are and who they love. Nothing.
The HRC keeps a record of “Your Elected Officials.” If you think your legislator is different, look at how they vote, as well as what they say. Too often, even someone who sounds reasonable, votes along party lines when the chips fall. We MUST NOT allow our elected leaders to condone bigotry, and encourage discrimination, on any grounds. Your voice counts.
It’s a long way yet to the election, but the statements our leaders are making, every day, emboldens people who think shooting my kids “protects people from the tranny freaks” and is worth lots of fun all-American points.
I am with you, all the way! Do you really have a lot of Republican readers? Hard to imagine many folks of that “persuasion” reading erotic gay romance books (or whatever the genre is labelled). But maybe the number of conservatives out there hoarding a dirty little secret reading stash would actually blow my mind? Still, I wouldn’t think they would choose Kaje Harper books for that pursuit, because your stories are not just steamy gay sex–they are really sensitive love stories with characters that you can identify with and get attached to. Of course, there are still the Log Cabin Republicans and those people truly baffle me.
There are good-hearted people who vote Republican. There are clearly LGBTQ people who vote Republican. What appeals to them varies and it would be egotistical of me to assume I know better on all of those topics, or that they should not vote their beliefs there.
But I really feel, when ALL the leaders of a party show blatantly that they would suppress the essential rights to health, family, housing and employment for an LGBTQ (or any other) minority, in order to placate a vocal few, they reveal a character flaw in the party establishment as a whole. When you have a major candidate calling gay relationships “abominations” (Carson) and another speaking up for a group in favor of ex-gay conversion (Rubio), when they support taking funds from HIV programs to pay for abstinence education, when they talk about overturning the legal ruling of the Supreme Court if gay marriage passes (Cruz)…
The level of self-satisfied bigotry is so universal I don’t think you can eliminate it except by saying No. No, there is no way we will accept that you can discriminate “just a little bit” to make your conservative constituents happy and be okay. No. There is no candidate who does not feel justified in denying people like my kids the right to ever marry, ever adopt children, ever feel safe in a job or apartment, or a bathroom.
And so No, there is no way that voting for any of these Republican candidates is a humane or ethical thing to do.
Really enjoyed your post. It is informative and articulate. I wished great minds really thought alike, because if they did we would all agree on this issue and get equal rights for all; like the constitution states. Thx, Kendra
I hope people will begin to see past the obvious lies and bigotry.
Like Ben Carson this week – he walked into a store where it appeared that one young cashier was being given a religious exemption not to sell a product that was unacceptable to his religion.
Carson should have celebrated, right? This is exactly what the so called “religious freedom” laws are for?
But no, he started screaming about Sharia law, because the cashier looked Middle-Eastern and had a non-Anglo name, and the product was alcohol.
To these hypocrites, “freedom” to practice your religion this way applies only to a Christian, like a pharmacist who doesn’t want to sell birth control, but not to a Muslim who doesn’t want to sell alcohol. They don’t want freedom, they want tyranny by the evangelical Christian right, and no one else. (The fact that it turned out that the kid wasn’t selling alcohol on his lane because he was under 21, not Muslim, is ironic, but not the point.)
Perhaps I’m an optimist, but I do hope voters will see past the rhetoric to what these people actually represent.
I keep telling my sweet “good Catholic” mom that it doesn’t matter how harmless she thinks it is to have a nativity scene on the courthouse lawn or “In God We Trust” on our money, we can only truly have freedom OF religion if we have freedom FROM religion. Otherwise someday someone is going to present an official list of “acceptable” religions and make you choose. We already know that some religions are more acceptable than others as a matter of practice, if not law. And frankly, the law (or those who interpret it) does actually favor some religions already. These people like Carson are not for religious freedom, they are for (Christian fundamentalist) theocracy.
I am an atheist. When will they come for me? Or will I live to see the day that there is no such thing as a “National Prayer Breakfast” attended by the President, much less the day we elect an atheist President? Currently, corporations are people who have religious rights that extend to denying birth control to their employees. We are moving in the wrong direction.
Sorry, I get a little excited about such things. Suffice it to say, I agree with you 1000%.
Kaje, my friend, thanks for your taking those who attack equal rights for non hetero male normative as special right and an attack on American values. the words “family values” still make me cringe as If I didn’t come from a traditional family even though I am now all grown up and A proud Gay Male. Love is love and all people are created equal. keep up the good writing and the good work you do. rojoroaors@yahoo.com
Roger from goodreads.
Hi Rogier – how are you? How has college been going? Thanks for stopping by. Sorry I missed your comment before ((hugs))
Author or astronaut, you can’t not get political when it affects so many people so deeply. When it affects your children, you go above and beyond. I think you can afford to be optimistic at this point in the US, because the tide is changing. Slowly as molasses, perhaps, but we’re getting there. However, as someone who lives in a European, 96% Catholic country, I feel decidedly less optimistic. We voted for marriage equality, just like the Irish did recently, but our vote was 65% against. People here are simply not gay, not publicly, except maybe in the capital, and only the braver ones. As a professor and a mother, I see kids who struggle every single day, I recognize them and it breaks my heart because it’s unlikely that they’ll ever be allowed to be themselves.
Clever rethoric or not, these politicians can’t be allowed to gain any more power than they already have.
Well, 65% against means 35% for. In a heavily Catholic country, that has to be forward progress too, no? All we can do I guess is talk and write and stand up and hope.