Monday 30 March 2015

Not jonesing for Indiana

This is not my place. I'm not American. I don't fully understand America's political or electoral systems. I've never even been there. So I know, this is not my place.

What just happened in Indiana could never happen in any EU country. The European Human Rights Act ensures no one gets to be so offended by another person's skin colour, religion, or sexual orientation that they can refuse service. Because no one gets to impose their misguided ideas about What Would Jesus Do on people who are in their life for the blink of an eye and then gone again. For as long as it takes for them to hand over a coffee or a cake and take their money, can they really not stuff down their revulsion? Is it so important to them that their constructed white Jesus gets to hate the same people they do?

What bible do they read? For me, all religion goes from benign pantomime to outright force for evil depending on where the scale is sitting, but why is fundamentalist Christianity a rollicking good idea but being a fundamentalist Muslim, when both religions have far more in common than separating them, the most evilest thing in the world? Why can't they realise that adopting laws Al Qaeda would be proud of makes them just as bad? Worse even, since the media and their holy high heid yins are always trying to convince us what barbarians the Muslims are, without thinking for one moment that when the nice white Christians seek to oppress people who Aren't Like Them they're doing exactly the same thing?

Exactly the same thing.

If I was any kind of Christian I would be furious - absolutely fucking furious - about what these people are doing in the name of my religion. I left the Catholic church 20 years ago because I couldn't bear to associate with a faith that wanted half my friends to be inferior because of who they want to have sex with. We always hear about Muslims not condemning terrorism strongly enough, but Christians get a media pass if they don't condemn utter inhumanity.

I'm not saying everyone should accept gay people. Much as anyone who thought they were immoral would never be a friend of mind, I accept that attitude exists, and I don't seek to talk people out of it. But religion does not bestow a right to be a bigot. It's a cover story, a mask, an excuse. They have to feel these things without blaming God or Jesus or Allah or Jehovah or whoever they want to pass the buck to.

And I think that's what bothers me most about this law. Conservatives are always big on personal responsibility, but they're happy to let a 2,000-year-old book tell them how to behave, even when they've quite clearly read it wrong. They want responsibility up until the point they can make a dickhead governor sign a law that abdicates them from their personal feelings. They scream about their rights while campaigning to strip others of theirs. As soon as a Muslim doctor refuses to treat an alcoholic they will howl, because these rights are only intended for Christians. And no one supporting this law has a right to that name.

So, not my place. But I said it anyway.