The minds of many social conservatives have gotten so sick, it’s frightening. So Rep. Virginia Foxx, R. North Carolina, thinks Matthew Shepard’s brutal murder was a “hoax.” And she sees fit to say so in the presence of his mother.
What is wrong with these people? Really?
A “hoax,” perpetuated by whom? And why? How on God’s green earth can it be a “hoax?” Does that mean Matthew is not really dead?
The whole “gay people want special protections” argument just flummoxes me. I know a lot of people who say that. I must admit that I used to think so, myself. But the more I lived life as a lesbian, “out” in the big, cold world, the more the reality of our situation hit me.
No one wants — or needs — special protections. We all just want to be safe and to live at peace. Of course we do. Why shouldn’t we?
Not all of us can afford to live in a city or state where we have the political clout to secure just laws for ourselves and our families and friends. As a matter of fact, most of us probably can’t.
We don’t have to be safer than anybody else. We only want to be as safe as everybody else. But there are still a great many places in this country — too many — where state or local authorities refuse to protect us the way they do heterosexuals and those who conform to conventional gender expectations.
Federal hate crimes laws simply extend to us the same protections others already enjoy. They enable us to live in safety and peace — no matter where, in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave — we happen to live.
It’s still a crap-shoot whether we can afford to live in a place where we can legally marry for love. It should not be a crap-shoot whether we can afford to live in a place where we can merely stay alive.
I pray for the day when we no longer need hate crimes legislation to keep us safe. To suggest that there is anything wrong with our not wanting to be murdered in the meantime is nothing but a slander.
If anyone is perpetuating a hoax on the American people, it is Virginia Foxx and her gang of socially-reactionary moral midgets.
Many of these people boast about their church attendance. But the only church to which they really belong is the Church of the Poisoned Mind.
A self-described “Libertarian Episcopalian lesbian,” freelance writer and the author of Good Clowns, a young adult novel published in 2018, Lori Heine published a blog called Born on 9-11 and was a frequent contributor to the website Liberty Unbound. A native of Phoenix, Ariz., she graduated from Grand Canyon University in 1988 and spent much of her life in the insurance industry before turning full-time to writing as a freelancer, blogger and author.