One of the things I detest most in the world is the gender stencils we’re forced into, robbing us of fabulous things we could have spent our childhood partaking in, like skirts and kissing boys. The gender binary is a bloody hideous tool with which our pliant society has been beaten, until recently.
But, dear friends, that is not the only binary that drives me madder than that whispery way Keira Knightley talks. The supposition that our people cannot be religious annoys me worse than a mosquito bite on the scrotum (we do some adventurous gardening).
I am surrounded by Christian homosexuals in my life, and to the degree I know, they are very secure in both their faith and their lives. I am not going to sit here and litigate what Christianity and its spokespeople say about same-gendered people banging, falling in love with and objectifying one another, but it is quite obvious that the two ideas are compatible to those who have thought about them.
Mike Huckabee, who I’m happy to see is doing worse in the presidential polls than Christian Slater is in movies, has recently gone on a hate binge about a rainbow packet of Doritos deserving a Christian equivalent. I’m not quite sure what he expects, but if it’s a bread and fish flavor that lasts for 40 days and 40 nights, I’ll buy the thing for novelty’s sake. Huckabee, incorrect about so many things, has continued his trajectory into a black hole of perpetual wrongness by assuming that Christians are some sort of inverse of LGBT folks, creating the perfect opening for a pun scenario I choose not to exploit about how Jesus hung around with 12 men all the time.
This ugly turd of a scenario raised its pocked head when basketball player Jason Collins came out, and some gnomic windbag on ESPN began explaining to the world in whom and what Collins was entitled to believe.
Not only are our moral and sexual choices as LGBT people argued about by people who are not us, and not only do we need to get the highest court in the land to affirm for us the rights of marriage permitted to everyone else, we are also told explicitly what our religious beliefs are. Mike Huckabee and this ruptured testicle from ESPN are trying to dictate which religions gay people are welcome in, taking a job originally meant for, you know, Jesus and his colleagues Muhammad, Buddha and Vishnu.When I lived in London I knew plenty of queer Muslims, and Buddhism is something quite commonplace in the LGBT community nowadays (thanks hipsters). There are genuine Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, pagans, wiccans, Taoists, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, Jews and more who sit comfortably both in religion and on top of a penis.
We are quite capable of working out our own religious values. The fact that we have to navigate a world that tried to undo us from childhood means we’ve had our beliefs tested more than Common Core. When it comes to religion, we know what we are talking about, because we have been confronted so many times by a malleable media that loves to magnify absurdity.
We have absolutely no right to dictate the religious beliefs of anyone else, or have them dictated to us. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender brothers and sisters, can I hear a “Hallelujah?”