Protecting straight people

Here in Arizona, our state legislature is obsessed with protecting the rights of the oppressed. Which would be great, if the oppressed who need protection weren’t just old white people with poor reading skills. After great success with SB1070—a.k.a the “Brown people are scary” bill—which caused a wave of boycotts against Arizona’s crucial tourist and convention business, the state legislature is back to protect once again. This time, straight people.

Yes, apparently us straight people are under assault from militant gays who want to destroy our way of life. That’s right. Gay people want to force straight people to, uhm, acknowledge they are human beings? And this shall not stand.

Our state legislature has protected us by passing SB1062 which will enable any citizen to refuse to do business with anybody they damn well please if doing business with this particular person is against that person’s religious beliefs. The bill is sitting on Governor Brewer’s desk waiting to be signed or vetoed. Nobody seems sure which way she’ll go.

So there you go, queers. You are bad people. At least based on a couple of lines out of the Old Testament. Which also has stern things to say about shrimp, menstruation and mixing materials in your clothes.

This really really gets me about the “gays are bad” agenda: You’re cherry picking from Leviticus, which is a Bronze Age crazy town of indictments about all kinds of things. Most of which the religious right fail. See above with the clothes, shrimp and menstruating women. You can’t pick one effing thing out of those and go, “See! God agrees!” If you follow one you have to follow all. Or did I miss something and the Bible is a make your own adventure?

It’s also interesting that Jesus—the guy the people who wrote this bigot bill claim to follow—had nothing to say about homosexuality. Not. A. Thing. But sure, let’s delve into Leviticus to find one passage and ignore the rest of it.

I’m pretty sure the Lord meant Leviticus was all or nothing. So stop it. Stop treating it like a smorgasboard. How can you even do that? How can you look yourself in the mirror and think, Yup, did the Lord’s work today, while you’re wearing two different fibers. You really shouldn’t be ignorant of the thing you claim rules your life, you know?

I was intending to write a post about how obviously bigoted SB1062 is and to argue vehemently against it, but that’s pretty pointless since the kind of person who backs legislation like this will not be swayed by things like reason and logic.

Instead, what I find fascinating is the mindset of the kind of person who deems this kind of bill necessary.

There you are, in America, a Christian. The president of the United States of America is a Christian, every member of the Supreme Court is a Christian, every member of the House of Representatives is Christian, while the Senate is mayhem with several Jews and a lonely Buddhist.

So these are the people who make and interpret the laws in this country. Vast Christian majority.

And yet, you feel you are under assault. All the old values are breaking down. The Apocalypse is close.

With every legislation-passing body comprised of your peers, to have convinced yourself you’re under attack is a level of of delusion that is almost impressive.

But what must it be like to live that way? To wake up every morning afraid, to watch the shadows for the people who are coming for you, to see a conspiracy to oppress you advance every day, to be angry at assaults on your liberty that only exist in your head, to go to bed every night sure that you’ve lost and that doom is getting closer. Even though none of that is happening?

It must be a horrifying existence.