I’m coming out against the agenda and the lifestyle. Against the agenda of exclusionism and the hate-based lifestyle. Oh, you thought I was talking about something else?
What does the queer agenda really entail? We want no one to kill us for being queer. We’d like to have homes to live in, and we expect to pay for them (I’m way ahead on my mortgage, incidentally). We want to work, and a lot of us are exceptionally skilled people with a lot to give to society. We want to be able to love our partners openly – we know that humans are not the most monogamous of species, but stable partnerships are a bedrock of human society. Or, we don’t. Some of us want to be able to engage in safe, consensual, casual sex, polyamory, or maybe don’t want sex. Not that straight people ever fool around. We want to be integrated in society – some of us, for the love of God, want to go to church (now if that isn’t a civilization-destroying agenda that will bring about the apocalypse, what is?).
And we don’t want to pretend. Trust me, I know pretending. I know how much time and energy I spent pretending, and what else I could have been doing for the world in that time creatively or in my profession.
Meanwhile, people out there use religion as a basis to say that people and human rights are not sacred. They use Christ, a guy who hung out with prostitutes and corrupt officials if he thought there was a spark of good in them, who brought Jews and Gentiles together, who turned over the money tables in the church, to say that it’s right to discriminate. Frederick Douglass rightly pointed out that the “Christ of the Cross” is a total stranger to these people (but not to him). There’s more absurdity out there. People who claim to advocate for women on the absurd basis that trans women, who identify, act, live, like women, who fought and paid tremendous prices for their womanhood, are not women, and that trans men, who want to be treated a men, are, absurdly, women. And people who claim to advocate for men on the same absurd basis. And these supposed radicals on the left don’t see a problem with the fact that they’re allied with radicals on the right who think women should be barefoot and pregnant and that guns are more important than people.
Most absurdly, some of these people advocate hating and oppressing other people, discriminating, excluding, as upholding American values. This is the moral equivalent of lining the bird cage with the Declaration of Independence.
Admittedly there were some screw-ups on the road to freedom,
but we should own them, not celebrate them, right?
So my call to arms is this: judge people and movements by their inclusiveness. No one is making the world a better place for anyone by saying someone else doesn’t matter, isn’t a sacred life, should be discriminated against or even killed. No one ultimately achieved their rights by destroying someone else. And any movement that is predicated on locking the doors to keep people out is not the way to the promised land (preferably paved with rainbows and not gold).
Mira Charlotte Krishnan 