Rumor Has It...

I posted about the kicker from The Chiefs and his commencement speech on Facebook. 

What he said is a viewpoint that is held by a not insignificant amount of conservative Christians. It's not a big outlier.  And we should stop acting surprised every time one of them says it in a public or semi public forum. This is what the Christian Nationalist who are trying to take over our government believe. White men should hold all of the power. Women should support them. End of. 

And there are enough women who are raised with this indoctrination that they believe it to be true as well. In fact if you were to try to buy one of his jerseys right now the women's sizes are all sold out. And they vote for Republicans and try to ban books to save the children from the horrors of learning that not everyone believes what they believe.

And people get really complacent about it because we all know people who identify as Christian who aren't like that. I have friends and family who have their faith but don't fall into the line of women should only strive to be wives and mothers. Family who would go with us to a Pride parade and be lovely to Katie's girlfriend. Hell, who embraced Katie with love when she came out. But not all of them are like that. 

And just like people scream for moderate Muslims to condemn the violence when Al Qaeda attacks or when women are forced to wear burkas or girls are banned from schools, the moderate Christians need to start condemning these radical Christian Nationalists when they call for attacking the government, denying women healthcare, banning books and saying things like obviously men should be in charge. 

When they make speeches at commencements and decry LGBTQ2+ people, women with careers, men not being manly enough and on and on...you need to say something. 

The rumors have started that he had a homosexual relationship in college and then went to conversion therapy.

I don't know if he did or if he didn't, but it makes sense. Not just because his Instagram feed is the weirdest blend of look how good I look in a suit pictures paired with Bible verses I've ever seen but...

Conversion therapy never made anyone less gay. What it can do though is cause the self loathing to become more deeply ingrained. People end up cosplaying straight. Look how macho and masculine I am! I have a giant beard! Or as he said in his speech, don't be afraid to embrace your masculinity. 

And talking about how women should be most excited to be a wife and mother even though his own mother is a highly educated physicist and his sister is a doctor? Well one of the things that happens in a lot of conversion therapy is they are told that it's the mother's fault her boy is gay. 

See, she's usurped the role of the father. Either because she's a single mom, or because she's emasculated him by becoming the breadwinner, or too opinionated, or too competitive. If she were more docile then he would be able to be more manly and their dear boy would have had the right role model and wouldn't have ended up gay.

Mom's fault. 

So if you buy into that then yeah, you're going to refer to the billionaire your teammate is dating as "his girlfriend" while you quote the lyrics to one of her songs. You're going to get all choked up when you talk about how your wife has put her entire life toward making sure you are a success. You're going to tell a room full of women who just finished working their asses off to get their degrees that that is cute and all but just wait until they start their REAL calling of wife and mom. 

Also years of watching the most adamantly anti LGBTQ2+ people end up outed as gay makes this feel really plausible. 

Conversion therapy never made anyone less gay.
You cannot pray the gay away. 

What you can do is admit that if you believe your god doesn't make mistakes and you are the way you are and you believe your god made you then you are not a mistake. That maybe the people using the clobber verses against you are the ones making a mistake. Translation, theology, historical interpretation, picking and choosing which verse to take literally and which ones are metaphorical, or we realize are just based on the culture they lived in (slaves are a-okay for instance), those are the mistakes. Not you. You can keep your faith and also be fully you. 

And as you do, you need to make sure you are speaking out against the radicals who would like to force you to hate yourself just as much as they do.