Playing the Motherhood Card. Via Sisyphus Shrugged, a powerful letter-to-the-editor about homophobia:
I’m tired of your foolish rhetoric about the “homosexual agenda” and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.
My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay.
He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called “fag” incessantly, starting when he was 6.
In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn’t bear to continue living any longer, that he didn’t want to be gay and that he couldn’t face a life without dignity.
You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don’t know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn’t put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it’s about time you started doing that. […]
If you want to tout your own morality, you’d best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you.
Atrios has the full text of the letter..
Oh my God. This woman rocks. And those hypocrites should get on their hands and knees and beg her son and her family for their forgiveness.
Wow. Wow wow wow. We should all be more like her.
It is completely obvious, to me at least, that in 50 years people who railed against equal rights for homosexuals will be viewed with the repugnance that we all view the “Integration Never” crowd of 50 years ago.
What is shocking to me is that other people don’t see this. Even if I were actually against gay rights, I couldn’t imagine actually coming out and SAYING it. It should just be too obvious that I’d have to end up recanting in 20 years or else suffer a Trent Lott-like fate.
Most of the right-wing pundits — at least most of the smart ones — should see how obvious it is that their arguments simply don’t hold water. “Same sex marriage is different from interracial marriage because . . .” Well it’s not, and that should just be obvious.
I can certainly understand the “ick” factor, (“I don’t support gay rights because I find gay sex icky”), but that’s a reason to ignore the issue, not to spew hatred.
It was quite a wake-up call to me when the SSM mariage debate exploded. I thought, “Wait…This is still an issue? People still have a problem with homosexual relationships? I thought we’d all become liberal on that like a decade ago…”
Ask any divorce lawyer for their position on SSM
Which would be that an orderly divorce process is far superior to the ad-hoc, no-holds-barred breakups you get in couples that have no legal protection at all.
This woman rocks. I doubt it will get through to the weasels, but maybe some fence-sitters will finally be ashamed of themselves.