LGBTQIA+

 

Where to start?

            I’m old enough that I can remember a simpler world where there was just straight people and queers. As time passed people’s interactions with one another became more complicated.

LGBTQIA+

            What do all those initials mean anyway? Well, I had to look them all up. Here’s a link that explains what each letter of the acronym stands for. 

            There are other terms like binary, cisgender, etc. Since I tend to be a little thick my wife is constantly explaining them to me.

 Dumb Ass

            “What am I again babe?”

            “For the umpteenth time you’re cis!”

            “And what are my pronouns?”

            “He and dumb ass!”

            “Ha! Dumb ass isn’t a pronoun!”

            I like to dazzle her occasionally with expressions of insight and knowledge especially when it’s so obvious that I am being mocked. Being a man of a certain age I kind of lean towards the “A” anyway. We may have to rethink my pronouns.

            But what does LGBTQIA+ mean and why isn’t an “H” in there?

GAGA

            The conservative estimate is that 10% of the population identifies with one of the letters in LGBTQIA+. Ten percent. I think it’s more than that but even with that percentage we’re talking 30 million plus people in this country.

            OMG! They’re everywhere. Yes they are. At those numbers practically every family in America has an LGBTQIA+ person in their midst. They may not want to admit it. They may not want to talk about it. But they are there. What’s more they have always been there. None of this is new. Thousands of years of history acknowledge their being with us. It’s normal.

            I happen to be straight and it’s like Lady Gaga said, “I was born this way.” I could have been born under the sign of any other letter but I wasn’t.

I was born this way.

Lucky me.

            Why would I make such an outrageous comment like ‘lucky me.’ Well, no one wanted to punish me for being straight. It never came up. No one wanted to discriminate against me for being straight. No one wanted to kill me simply because I am straight. It was easy to get married and have kids. It was not an impediment to getting a job. Hippie hair was but that’s a different matter altogether. I had no trouble buying cakes.

It just doesn’t matter

            Being LGBTQIA+ is decidedly NOT okay with the majority of Conservative Republicans or the previous administration, sadly, like many others. Being LGBTQIA+ is NOT okay with Christian Nationalists like those in the Evangelical Party from the Church of Just Us. They want to impose their religious beliefs on all the rest of society. BTW that love the sinner hate the sin is a nice catchy phrase and it’s bullshit. They hate the sinner and they want the sinner punished. (Not only that, they spend way too much time contemplating the sin. It would help if they would just stop thinking so much about other people’s sex lives. That would minimize the “ick” factor considerably for them.) They want their ancient made up religious laws to apply to the secular world. They’ll tell you that they have a god given right to do that.

They don’t!

All lives matter.

Frankly my dear

            Choice not nature. Who cares? It’s supposed to be the land of the free not pick and choose who gets to be free with full equality. It isn’t just for those dressed in white robes with pointy hats. People can choose to be any letter that they want. It’s no skin off my nose. Doesn’t pose any kind of threat to me or my family or those that I choose to be my family. What my family chooses or is, is up to them.

            These bigots are NOT the victims, no matter how much they lament and beat their breasts. Sadly their LGBTQIA+ children are victims too many times. The people using the cudgels are claiming that those they are using them on are a threat simply by existing. They want them submissive. Here’s what I’ve got to say to that.

What Clark said.

So, what does LGBTQIA+ mean?

            It means that we are wonderfully and beautifully diverse.

We were born this way.

Christian Tyranny

 

Common thread,

            There’s a common thread that runs through The Chosen One’s Christian America especially by the CPLoA. One sect of one religion’s beliefs are advocated. One. We’re a nation under one God. Their God. Not the other make believe Gods.

            BTW their God is NOT the Pope. Well some of them do have a Pope but they really don’t worship the Pope. They do have a different bible. BUT there’s lots of different bibles. LOTs of different sects too.

            Most of them get along. Well some of the time. There’s a lot of infighting at times. They argue about who gets to go to heaven and who doesn’t. Jews don’t. That seems kind of odd doesn’t it? It sounds like they’re anti-Semitic. The reason they push for the end times is that everybody dies. Well, not everybody. Evangelicals make the cut.

            They also argue about marriage, sex, communion, immigrants, the bible, science, history and some other things. Trump is advancing their world view whatever it is. There’s one thing to keep in mind when dealing with them.

They’re seriously screwed up.

Then there’s the godless atheists.

            I’d write more about them but they don’t pray to any make believe God. They just wish people good luck. They say things like, “Good luck in not getting the virus!”

            Would luck be an unseen force? How about ghosts? I don’t believe in ghosts either. Do atheists? I also think that Oswald shot Kennedy. What do I know? They might want to join the CPLoA but the Evangelicals won’t let them. Punishment is their bailiwick.

            The atheists I know are way more moral than Evangelicals. Way more.

Light years more.

Praying to Allah.

            The nation needs prayer back in school! Prayer to a Christian God. That prayer. No other praying allowed by them. Except this is America and Muslims could pray too. Pray to Allah! Christian children forced to pray to Allah by Christians! Uh, what? Under four years of Trump. He didn’t change that?

            Well, not to worry, Trump and Evangelicals are hammering out a NEW Constitution with NEW rules. The Supremes will be singing backup. Not all of them. Just most of them. At least now they have a soprano. Kavanaugh can go back to being an alto.

Other side of the coin.

            In a Christian nation Christians ….

Ω  would not have bowed down to the Great Liar, President Donald Trump.

Ω  would have done everything possible to protect those most vulnerable from the virus.

Ω  would NOT have put money before people.

Ω  would have worn masks from the very beginning even if the government did nothing.

Ω  would have done everything humanly possible to help immigrants.

Ω  would NOT have separated children from their parents.

Ω  would NOT use the government to impose their religious views on others.

I’m positive

            There are a lot of Pastors and people of faith that oppose the evil that Trump stands for. They oppose him in the way they live their lives. They oppose Trump by using the language that I do. They believe in Jesus. The Jesus of the bible that was NOT a conservative; who was liberal and socialist before the terms were invented. He put people first. NOT money. Unlike Republicans he would have made sure that those in need were fed first and had a place to sleep for the night. Jesus struggled against a tyrant.

A tyrant killed him for his efforts.

Out of Denial

Flip flops

            Who were among the very first to tell us what a bad President Trump would make?

            It was Republicans—a lot of leaders of the GOP along with their respective supporters. Men and women well known for their conservative backgrounds.

            At one point early in the Republican primary I believe that there were 20 candidates vying for the nomination in the 2016 primaries. It was a tough roll-around-in-the-gutter race thanks to Donald Trump. So far the only time in our history as a nation that the size of a man’s penis was made a part of a Presidential debate. They were united by probably only one thing during that time – their contempt for Donald Trump. Are we to believe now that they were all liars and rogues that didn’t really mean what they said about then candidate Donald Trump?

            But now, a lot of the very same people that told us how bad of a President he would make are blaming and claiming that the “Liberal” media is biased in their reporting and treating the President unfairly. Even though President Trump’s actions have proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that they were right in what they said about him.

Instead of claiming vindication they’re crying foul.

            Here’s a quote from President Trump’s book “The Art of the deal”.

        “Even though the publicity was almost entirely negative, there was a great deal of it, and that drew a tremendous amount of attention to Trump Tower. Almost immediately we saw an upsurge in the sales of apartments. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, and in truth it probably says something perverse about the culture we live in. But I’m a businessman, and I learned a lesson from that experience:  good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.”

Fake news invented

            As it turns out he apparently doesn’t really believe that. Now he calls bad publicity “fake news”. He still wants it though. He craves it. He spends hours watching it.

            President Trump is the one marketing his Presidency. He sells what he isn’t every day. He sells it daily with his tweets and actions. He’s selling it with his lies. He lied before he started seeking the office. He lied while running for office. He has lied as President. It’s his nature. He has made the office of the President a seemingly never-ending soap opera. He did it. The man that campaigned on doing it all from day one and appointing the best people did it to himself.

Good people did catch on.

        Here’s another quote from President Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal”.

        “You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.

        I’d never understood how Jimmy Carter became president. The answer is that as poorly qualified as he was for the job, Jimmy Carter had the nerve, the guts, the balls, to ask for something extraordinary. That ability above all helped him get elected president. But then, of course, the America people caught on pretty quickly that Carter couldn’t do the job, and he lost in a landslide when he ran for reelection.”

            Well, his cult appears to not have caught on yet. They didn’t get the memo. They’re still being conned by the man that considers shaking hands with them disgusting. His cult aren’t the people that he hob nobs with. They are the people that he uses. They are his servants.

They are expendable.

 Tribal chanting.

            We don’t have to depend upon media interpretation to know what he’s doing. We just watch the video of him talking and read his tweets as he flails around from one day to the next. His history is laid out before us. He has reversed himself time and time again. He does the very same things that he criticized President Obama for doing. All anyone has to do is watch the entire videos made during his campaign and before. They’re there.

            Here’s a link to a video where he said that he would release his tax returns if he ran for President. It’s a long video and he was quite coherent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg-5KEt1Abg He made his comments about his tax returns at about a minute and a half into the video. He talked about a lot of other things as well that he has ended up making a complete mockery of.

            Here’s some video from one of his Thank You rallies where he says that locking up Hillary Clinton was just campaign talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix49LjgaTaI How about that. Nothing happened. Nothing. How many of his supporters bought into that? I’m guessing not many. It was just fun to chant. They’re still chanting it.

Favorite lie.

            This is a favorite of mine. Seriously. Watch this video. It’s from Fox News. President Trump claims that the story about him hitting his music teacher is not true and that he hates the story. The story comes from his book! On page 71 of his book “Trump the Art of the Deal” he said that he gave his music teacher a black eye. The book that he says he wrote.

https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20161125_020000_OBJECTified_Donald_Trump/start/180/end/240 (Click on the video at 6:03 pm. The text is below the video.)

He hasn’t changed. He has only gotten worse.

Put the ‘fun’ in fundamentals.

            Evangelicals like Franklin Graham and Pool Boy Falwell Jr. talk about the faith of President Trump and his Christian values. The public sees what his Christian values are like on a daily basis through his tweets and his actions.

            Here is a link to Trump’s view on just one of the fundamentals of the faith. In response to a question Trump answered that he doesn’t ask God for forgiveness. He tried not to answer the question but finally at a minute and a half into the video he says no, he doesn’t. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyDbOHvfdiE

The point.

            What’s the point of all this? For me the point is that supporters of President Trump in general accept all this. They accept the thousands of his well-documented lies. They hear the same falsehoods that the rest of us do and know that he has contradicted or reversed himself time and time again. They know that in spite of complaining about President Obama golfing and taking too many vacations and saying that he wouldn’t have time, he vacations and golfs more than Obama did. They expected that he would give tax breaks to the rich at the expense of the middle class. They knew that he had taken advantage of rich, poor and everyone in between most of his adult life. They see that the man who said that he was going to appoint the “best” people has seen almost half of his staff come and go. Some only lasted hours.

The main take-away is that they don’t care.

 Code speak

        They understand his basic code. He’s a white President that is undoing everything that the black President before him did. The Neo Nazis, Alt Right, White Nationalists, Confederates and Evangelicals figured out early in the game who Donald Trump was at his core. It’s why they continue to support him. He doesn’t like brown people of any shade—immigrants, Mexicans and people of color from all points further south. He isn’t too crazy about yellow people either. He does make exceptions for those that are giving him money or making it easier for him to make money, like Middle Easterners, or those dictators he admires, like Kim Jong Un. He embodies the white privilege his followers say they don’t understand. He’s tearing apart the government that has let them down in favor of people of color. He’s fulfilling prophesies for the guns and bibles crowd. Those that don’t admire or aspire to be him for his moral failings are perfectly willing to overlook them in favor of his greater good ….

…. for a Whiter America.