On my way home from the GLBT Centre on Tuesday (printing off a few things and thanking Rahn for his spectacular work with Pridefest), I saw this truck that was painted up with all sorts of Biblical hate speech against homosexuality and Senate Bill 200 (PDF).
For the uninitiated, Senate Bill 200 was a Colorado bill that was signed into law by Governor Ritter. It prohibits discrimination based on Sexual Orientation and this also included ‘Transgender Status’. While it does not require religious institutions to follow it’s anti-discrimination codes, it does require other public facilities not to discriminate against gay and transsexual people. Focus on the Family, a hate group based in Colorado Springs, was rallying against the bill, making false claims that if the bill were to be passed, it would allow paedophiles and rapists to infiltrate the women’s bathroom under the guise of transwomen (they phrased it transsexual men).
When my bus was passing it, I was trying to decide whether I would sit on the bus and regret not doing something later or get off the bus and talk to people about SB 200 now. Fortunately, the 16 was stopped at Broadway & Colfax for an inordinate amount of time, so I was able to get off and head across Civic Centre park to the truck.
Looking closer at the truck, there was a lot of hate speech on the truck against homosexuals and very little about Senate Bill 200. I was going to talk to the man with the truck, but ultimately, he was about to begin an interview with a man in a blue suit. He was getting miked up so he could spread his diatribes of hate and poison, never once letting a morsel of logic slip through his evil sneer.
The old hatemonger even proceeded to calling me a “pervert”. Now, I laugh at that concept because it seems that he and his ilk are so willing to bring this stuff out into the open instead of allowing it to occur in the intimacy and privacy of a loving couple’s bedroom. True, I think about sex, but I don’t bring up my private thoughts, sexual fantasies adn wet dreams to complete strangers. So, am I a pervert? I don’t think that I am.
He then proceeded to calling me “evil”. The ameraman pointed the camera towards me and I just smiled and waved. They asked me if I was evil and told them “no, I am just an atheistic male-to-female transsexual lesbian.” Once I told them that, they asked the old man if he’d like to have a few words to say to me. The old man would have none of that though, because other than name calling, he probably did not want to recognise my presence there.
The interview ended shortly thereafter and I talked with the interviewer. It turns out that he is also an atheist and he just got back from the Freedom From Religion Foundation office in Denver. And the thing he told me is that “these people just shoot themselves in the foot, you don’t have to point out that they are crazy”. Then it hit me, the biggest thing I could do for LGBT activism is stand back and provide the colour commentary for the insanity that these people evoke. I don’t have to change much, but it would be nice to record their diatribes for their own public humiliation to continue.
The close this post off, I would like to mention that when I was on my way to the alley today, there was something on the man’s truck that rung in my mind. Along all the hate speech posted on his truck, there was a phrase on the truck that said “the Bible is truth, not hate speech”. If this is so, why do you use the Bible for hate speech and the advocacy for discrimination? Can’t you see that you are being laughted at? Can you see that if you did not have this insane obssession with homosexuality, you would see the fool that you were acting like. If the Bible is truth, then why not take a passage from it? “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” How about one of Jesus’ many parables of forgiveness? Or how about “Love thy neighbour”. Sounds like you, sir, are a modern-day Pharasee.
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