My friend Drew commented on the "Sodomite Suppression Act" ballot initiative, which proposes to legalize the murder of LGBT people in California—how terrifying the detached rhetoric surrounding it was; how people were ignoring its violent insanity. This was my response.
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I really do get how you feel about this, Drew, because I lived through 9/11 in the South looking as I do, and at the time was married to a dark-skinned 'furriner' with a perceptible accent on top of it. The idea that people all around you hate you and want to kill you for something you can't help—hearing, for example, a whole grocery store go quiet as you and your husband walk in, and talk restart in whispers all around you, and enduring this again and again and again, everywhere—the idea that the people around you are only barely restrained from violence by the law, is terrifying on a visceral level. It was also inescapable. There was no getting around it, day or night, and nowhere safe to go.
In the face of that kind of hatred, the "let cooler heads prevail" attitude gets me hot under the collar too. "Cooler heads"? Is this some kind of 21st-century idiom for "sane people"?
After having read the proposal, I used the word 'psychotic' advisedly—this homicidal cretin is a full-bore, rubber-room-renting, delusional psychopath, and he and his psychotic Sodom and Gomorrah fantasies belong in an institution which also houses people who (to quote Lewis Black) are crocheting something that isn't there.
We as a society are lucky he raised red flags with this paperwork, instead of simply (!) turning into a serial killer.
We as a society are lucky he raised red flags with this paperwork, instead of simply (!) turning into a serial killer.
And to be clear, I think the same thing of all of the people you just described who stopped and thought about this before deciding it "went too far." They may not be actively psychotic, but they are delusional or stupid or unbalanced or (probably) all three. Countenancing, even for an instant, the idea of serial murder of people because you don't like them makes you creepy and not fit for decent society and not sharing the same reality as the rest of us...and that's not really a hard diagnosis to make.
What concerns me is that, because this man expressed his sociopathy through a religious ballot proposal, people fail to see how terrifyingly insane it is. Then again, people with a milder flavor of the same sociopathy are now protected in Indiana; instead of being barred from behavior that is antisocial and irrational, their antisocial, delusional behavior is being actively encouraged.
It's all part of the same mindset—and it's terrifying that sane people across the country are failing so utterly to see insanity when it's shrieking, spittle flying, into their faces.
Labels: california, civil rights, indiana, LGBT, religion, segregation, sociopaths
