religion

Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day

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I haven’t posted in awhile and I apologize for that.  I am here to talk about what happened yesterday because it seems that people were/are very confused and/or ignorant about the facts in the case of “Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day.”

You may have noticed that people are outraged that gay people have the audacity to boycott this Christian Atlanta based fast food giant.  People aren’t aware of all the facts, they judge us before they know what’s happening because the media is not telling them what is happening.  They are just telling you that we are evil for hating Chick-Fil-A and that we are all heathens for boycotting a Christian company because they spoke out against gay marriage.  That’s not the whole story.

You have to understand that gay people aren’t upset over their opinion because we expect them to say they are against gay marriage because they are a Christian company.  The thing that was upsetting to us was that they have spent nearly $5 million dollars on anti-gay causes and then made the statement that they are “guilty as charged.”  That was what fueled this whole thing.  Take a look at this.

If you don’t see why we are so outraged by this, then I really don’t know what else to say.  Exodus International alone is enough to piss us off because they took that money and they weren’t even able to do what they said they were doing.  They apologized to gay people for what they did AND they left their wives because THEY WERE GAY!  They took your money to convert gay people to straight and it was all for nothing.

Not convinced?  Take a look at this article from The Advocate.  Chick-Fil-A Donates $2 Mil to Antigay Groups.  They donated $2 million in 2010, they also donated $2 million in 2009.  Do you really think this is all about our religious bigotry now?  Why is a restaurant spending so much money to fund hate?  I mean, isn’t religion supposed to be about love and doing what Jesus would do (WWJD)?  Do you think Jesus Christ would approve of such behavior coming from a Christian based fast food restaurant?  No, I don’t think he would.

Thanks to Mike Huckabee for (allegedly) lying to his viewers by not giving them these facts when he told them that there should be a Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day which spawned this “Top 50 Homophobic Chick-Fil-A Tweets (with images).”

I think that I’ve seen and heard enough hatred in my 42 years from being bullied by my step-father and sister, school bullies and other homophobic people in my life that I am no longer shocked, but some of those tweets shook me to the core.  I mean I was literally shaking and my stomach was in knots.  Take a look.

  • Love chick fil a, even more so now that they hate fags. Thank gawd i can eat my chicken without the risk of getting aids!
  • I want some Chick-Fil-A, I also want some faggots to die
  • If I was Chick Fil A’s owner, I’d be happy that gay ppl protesting nshit. I wouldn’t want them filthy HIV+ fags eating my good chicken.
  • Stfu about chickfila if your a fag you shouldn’t go out in public, its just a successful business doing it the right way
  • If any body sees fags kissing in front of Chick-fil-a please feel free to hit them with you car.

Those were all that I could stomach before I had to stop reading the rest.  That last person told people to murder gay people with their car if they see them kissing in front of a Chick-Fil-A.  Is this how Jesus would want you people to talk?  I don’t think so.  What would Jesus do in this situation?  I think he would ask for all of the facts before he made a decision and I think he would side with the gay people on this.  He certainly wouldn’t condone murdering someone.  It is in the 10 commandments “Thou shall not kill.”  There is a passage about killing people for working on the sabbath, you don’t see people tweeting to kill people for working on Sunday do you?  No because it is illegal to murder people.

African American people fought for their freedom when they were slaves.  Women fought for their equality and the right to vote.  African Americans and Caucasion people fought for their rights to marry and that is all we are trying to do.  We just want a piece of paper giving us the same rights that heterosexual people have so that we can visit our life partners in the hospital and so we can bury them when they die and not be kicked out of our own houses because their family doesn’t recognize our relationship as being valid.

Someone posted a comment today saying that someone said that “Gay people have all the same freedoms that straight people have.  They have the freedom to marry the OPPOSITE sex if they want to.”

Put yourself in our situation.  Let’s say the roles were reversed and it was that gay people were normal, but straight people were the ones who didn’t have the right to marry.  Would you marry someone of the same sex just because you could?  No, because you would want to be with your spouse, not someone of the same sex.  Tell me you wouldn’t be fighting for what we are fighting for.  Tell me that your wife or your husband would be ok if you left them for someone of the same sex because it was more accepted.  You wouldn’t be ok with it, so why should we be ok with being forced to marry someone of the opposite sex when we aren’t straight?

Next time someone tells you that gay people are only whining about something stupid and insignificant, get the facts before jumping on the bandwagon and calling for the murder of a group of people simply because you don’t agree with how they were born.

My hope is that one day humanity will finally be able to evolve so that there is no more hatred among humanity.  I don’t mean to sound like a hippy, but I’m going to.  Why can’t we all just find peace and stop this fighting?  With peace there will be no more war and everyone can finally love their fellow man the way Jesus had intended it to be in the first place.  In the words of Rodney King may he rest in peace “Why can’t we all just get along?”

Sources: Images were taken from different sources, top one being http://imgur.com/lNItY and Chick-Fil-A $5 Mil chart from Say “NO” to Anti-Gay “Chick-Fil-A” on Facebook.

Update: I didn’t add it before because I didn’t research it enough, but I found an article that has more information about Chick-Fil-A Profits Are Supprting ‘Kill the Gays’ bill in Uganda.  Apparently in 2010, the Family Research Council spent $25,000 lobbying U.S. Congress to NOT condemn Uganda’s ‘Kill the Gays’ bill.  Chick-Fil-A donated $2 million towards these hate groups in 2009 and another $2 million in 2010 to FMC, which is where they got that money to spend on allowing a country to kill their own people based on how they were born.  Disgusting!

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Anti-Gay/Anti-Religious Bigotry on Facebook

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Photo taken from Facebook page “I bet this turkey can get more fans than NOM”

I have been asked a lot lately from Christians why I post so many anti-religious images on Facebook, not just my book page, but also my own personal Facebook page.  The answer is not that I am anti-religion, it’s that I am fighting in a war brought on by right-wing fundamentalist born again Christians who are trying to take away my and every other gay persons rights across the country and even the world.

Just about every day I browse the Facebook “Home” page and see images from such pages as “I bet this turkey can get more fans than NOM“, “Have a Gay Day” and “Wipe out homophobia” just to name a few.  I see pictures of the fundamentalists like the famous Westboro Baptist Church with signs that say “God Hates Fags” among other hateful things.  Then I see pro-gay images like this:

So when people see me posting images like this, they think that I am an anti-religious bigot.  I have been hearing homophobic bible scriptures since I was a teenager, such as Leviticus 18:22 saying “‘Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.”  But what they don’t realize is that this was written by a person, not by God.  Whoever wrote that was obviously homophobic.  I believe that if God does exist, he made gay people for a reason.  We aren’t flaws or mistakes and we didn’t choose to be gay or to be abnormal, we were made exactly the way we were supposed to be made.

There are many messed up things in the bible.  In fact, Leviticus says some pretty stupid things like Leviticus 19:27 “Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.”  How many religious people do you know who cut their hair and shave their face?  I don’t go around telling them how sinful they are, so why are they telling me how I’m going to hell for being gay?

And right next to that in Leviticus 19:28 it says “Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD.”  How many right-wing fundamentalist born again Christians do you see walking around with a tattoo on their body?  Cause I see a lot of them.  When I bring it up they tell me “Oh I did that a long time ago when I was a sinner before I found Jesus so it doesn’t count.”  Uh, I’m pretty sure it counts even if you say that Jesus wiped away all of your past sins.  I’m sorry but if it’s still on your body, it still counts to me.

I don’t have anything against religious people, it’s the religious people who preach to me that I am going to hell for being gay, that is where I have an issue.  I used to go to church every Sunday when I was living in Bakersfield in 1981/83.  I even went to church band camp.  I wasn’t really hard-core, I was just a regular christian just like everyone else who didn’t push my religion down people’s throats.  I was even a Mormon when I was 14 and went to the Mormon church and even went to the Mormon teen dances.  When I was 16 years old and worked at McDonald’s a customer started yelling at me because I asked if it was for “here or to-go” and he started cursing “the lord’s name in vain” and I got so upset that I almost started crying.  Not because he yelled, but because of what he said.  It really hurt my heart that he said what he said.

I stopped being religious when I came out of the closet and people started beating the bible into me.  My first boyfriend’s (who I call “William” in my book) mother used to preach Leviticus to me every time I saw her, she is who preached my religion out of me.  She is who made me the activist that I am today, well she and my sister who used to preach that I was going to hell for being gay (who later apologized to me for that).

Here is a great example of why I am so angry with the fundamentalist right-wing born again Christians.

Then there is this video.  Fischer: “It Is Altogether Right To Discriminate Against Homosexual Behavior” – YouTube

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v_PjOYGZ0o&feature=player_embedded

This is what we (the LGBTQIA community) are fighting against.  The right-wing fundamentalist born again Christians say that we are anti-religious bigots, but they started a war against gay people.  We aren’t anti-religion, we are just anti-those people.

All gay people want is to live their lives in peace without any controversy, but we have these evil Christians who have waged a war against us and all we are doing is fighting back, that’s all.  We don’t care who Christians worship, we just don’t want to be told that we are going to hell or that you don’t accept our lifestyle (as if we asked for permission).  If the right-wing fundamentalist born again Christians will stop threatening, bullying, beating and killing gay people, then we will be cool.  We just want to live normal lives, that’s all.

So the next time you see me posting something like this on Facebook or anywhere else, now you know why.

Oh and by the way, even though I am not a Christian anymore, I still believe in the positive teachings of Jesus Christ.  My favorite bible scripture is of him saying Matthew 5:43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'” 44 “But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” 45 “that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”  I personally believe that Jesus was a good person because he fed the poor and hungry and he healed the sick and gave sight to the blind, or so I have heard.  At any rate, I don’t hate Jesus, because Jesus was a good person.  I also love the Facebook page Jesus Loves Gays because I believe that he does.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>Stepping off my soapbox for now.

Caution: You Have Entered a (NO) Free Speech Zone

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Do you have freedom of speech?  I don’t.

I started using Facebook in 2007.  My life partner’s sister-in-law signed up for Facebook a few years later and immediately started telling me what to do.  The first thing she did was send me an email telling me that I can’t use a cartoon as my profile picture.  I was shocked that she had the nerve to tell me what I can do on my own Facebook page.  Then she told me that I wasn’t allowed to post any gay rights issues.  I was gobsmacked that she would tell me that because again, it’s MY wall.

To keep things neutral, I put a restriction on her and all of her family members, including a few of my own family members just in case.  If they don’t want to see certain things then I won’t shove it down their throats by allowing them to see it.  In return, they shove their religion down my throat every time they post religious stuff on their page.  Sounds fair, right?  That was sarcasm by the way.

Yesterday I woke up and found this in my inbox.

I was in shock again because everything that I had posted that was offensive to her was properly hidden, or so I thought.  Apparently on her new tablet using mobile Facebook, she can see EVERYTHING!  Not just the posts that I had shared and hidden but also all of my likes.  If I went through the list of posts on the Facebook “home” page and started clicking the like button, she saw all of those likes.  That means if I clicked like on “Have a Gay Day” she saw it and apparently that is so offensive to her that she just couldn’t stand looking at her own Facebook page because she was inundated with pro-gay stuff.

I went on a rant on Facebook yesterday saying if you don’t want to see my pro-gay shit then unfriend me, and she saw that too even after I unfriended her.  I had to unfriend her and her whole family and then block each one of them so none of them would see anything that might be offensive to them.  My book is also offensive to them.

Normally I would say this is MY life and if you don’t like it then hit the bricks, but this is my life partner’s family here, I can’t be a jerk to them because that would put a huge strain on our relationship, it already has.  So to build a bridge, I had to create a whole new Facebook page specifically for them to follow.  That means I will not be allowed to do anything.  I won’t be able to “Like” any gay Facebook pages or “Like” any pro-gay posts, heck I won’t be able to “Like” a status update from anyone out of fear that I am offending one person.

I am trying to be nice here and not cuss, but it’s very difficult.  I have already censored the F-word four times now.

So why am I telling you good people?  Because I am putting a warning out there for you all.  If you have fundamental born again Christian family members and/or in/outlaws, you are sharing too much stuff that they clearly don’t want to see.  Not that you have to care, but I’m just letting you know because I’m sure you don’t want to put a strain on your relationship with those people.

My life partner refuses to get on Facebook for this very reason.  I have thought about leaving Facebook many times, but I refuse to be silenced.  I want my voice to be heard, not just on my regular Facebook wall but also my books Facebook page.  My freedom of speech should not be limited, even though it has been, but to make up for the censorship, I am going to be even more vocal about my right to free speech and gay rights and equality because that is what I am passionate about.  I don’t give a flying… leap about what other people think of me, I am GAY and I am not going AWAY!  I’m here, I’m queer, GET FUCKING USED TO IT!

Yeah, I say that now, but then I go to that one Facebook page with my tail tucked between my legs and post pictures of kittens and puppies…  My balls have been removed and my fundie outlaw is wearing them as earrings.

I am 42 years old and I am not just being bullied, but I’m being cyberbullied by my own family.  Isn’t that a kick in the pants?