Ok younguns, around dawn this Ides of March, I dreamed about one of you and it caused me to think, “To tell the truf, politics and religion in America reveal everything you never wanted to know about America.”
My old Jewish friend in Key West, Sam Kaufman, who is a city commissioner and a practicing attorney, told me one day in his office that my talking about my dreams didn’t bother him, because Jewish people think dreams come from God.
That one of you I dreamed about last night was born a cross-wired girl, who always felt she was a boy, and there was nothing she could do about it, because that was how God made her, and since God doesn’t make mistakes, that was how God wanted her to be.
If my blaming God turns people off, then I just as easily can blame Mother Nature, but no way I ever can blame that babyfossil for what she had no control over, religious views to the contrary notwithstanding.
Eventually, with her parents' blessing, that cross-wired babyfossil had surgery that made her more male and she became much happier, and while that wasn't easy for someone as long in the tooth as I am to wrap his mind around, I knew very well what it's like to live in a body that doesn’t seem to suit me, and if I there was surgery that would make my cranky bowel be less cranky, I would have that surgery done, and I don’t see how God could be angry with me for that, any more than God is angry with our beloved she who became a he.
For you see, what is important to God is what’s in our hearts, and how we live - actions speak louder, than what we say about ourselves or even what we think. That’s what that Jewish guy Jesus in the Gospels was all about: doing the next right thing, live and let live, leave the judging to God, and God will not judge you
That’s not a big seller in some religious and political circles, and I am a guilty as the next person of judging and finger-pointing when I think someone with influence has gone off the rails and become a menace. But I do not judge queer people, who cannot be who some straight people think they should be, because their Bible tells them so, because it ain’t natural. because whatever.
I’ll let you in on a secret, babyfossils. I think people who get wyrdd about queer people deep down inside are wyrd themselves, but they don’t know it; or they know it, but pretend outwardly that it isn’t so. They pretend, because they hate being wyrd, because their Bible, or something, tells them being wyrd is bad, so they make sure nobody thinks they are wyrd, by being really against wyrd people.
Bible people’s favorite saint is St. Paul. I say that, because I heard Christians quote St. Paul far more than they quoted Jesus.
If you read St. Paul’s letters, you see he thought more highly of men than he did of women, and he told his followers that he wished they were like him, celibate. And, although Jesus never did it, Paul condemned homosexuality as an abomination.
When Paul was Saul of Tarsus, and was getting Christians crucified by the Roman government if they did not renounce Jesus, he was a Jewish Pharisee, and as such, he had, as did every Jewish man, a solemn duty to God to marry and have children and increase the numbers of God’s chosen people. Yet, there is nothing in Paul's letters about him having a wife and children, and I suppose every woman around Paul knew he was gay.
In 1996, I explained all of that to several gay men in Birmingham, some years younger than me, after the minister of Southside Baptist Church and my Sunday school teacher there had not convinced them to give our eclectic Sunday school class a try. After hearing what I said about Paul, they decided to attend our Sunday school class and they really liked it.
About 20 years later, there was a big flap in Key West, where the weird are said to go pro, about LBGTQ people, who made up around 20 percent of the people in the city. I went to a city commission meeting, and at the very end, when citizens can speak for 3 minutes about anything to the mayor and commissionerss and the public watching on the local TV station and live streaming, I recounted what I had told the young gay men in Birmingham about St. Paul.
Several years prior, a lesbian woman named Teri Johnston was elected to the Key West City Commission. I thought she was the best city commissioner the city ever had. She was unbeatable when her commission seat came up for election every 4 years, but she wore out, I thought, trying to get the city government do better, and she retired.
In 2018, I ran for mayor the 6th time, and Teri ran for mayor, and she won, and she got reelected easily in in 2020 and 2022, but she decided not to run in 2024, even though she could have won. I think she got tired again of trying to get the city government to do better.
Also while I lived in Key West, the city’s county commission seat was held by a lesbian woman named Heather Carruthers from 2008 through 2016, as I recall.
At a Key West Business Guild candidate forum in Key West, in 2010, when I was running for the county commission, the candiates were asked to state their position on LBGTQ people needing to feel safe in the Florida keys. The Business Guild had been started by LBGTQ people.
When my time to speak came, I said that topic is very personal to me, because my brother Major was bisexual in the closet in Birmingham, and someone found out and was leaning on him in some way, threatening to out him publicly, and there was nothing he could do to stop it, and he killed himself and tried to make it look like murder.
Major lived in San Francisco, then in Key West, then in St.Petersburg, before moving back to Birmingham and meeting a woman I knew and they got married and had two children, and he tried living a double life. We became estranged after he realized he could not persuade me that he was not bisexual, which my first wife, your grandmother, and my second wife, had known since the 1970s, and it never mattered to us. We merely hoped he would find happiness.
I tell you these things, babyfossils, because a lot of religious people in America are very prejudiced against LBGTQ people, and there is nothing that can be done to change their minds, and it might be dangerous to try to change their minds, so deep is their prejudice and so convinced are they that God is on their side. Unless you live in a place like Key West, it’s safer and maybe smarter, I think, to leave them alone and stay out of their way, than get in their faces about LGBTQ people.
Our beloved she who became a he lives in a part of America where queer people are better received than other parts of the country, and I hope he will simply do what he enjoys doing and keeps his head down and lets time and God work on the people who have a big charge about queer people. It takes a very long time for rivers to round and smooth stones in the river bed, and St. Paul made that process a lot slower for people who don’t like LBGTQ people.
Imagine what it did to the psyche of Christendom for its favorite saint to be a celibate in the closet gay man.
Imagine what it did to the psyche of Christendom for its Trinity to be all male. How do such a God reproduce?
In Judaism, the Spirit of God is called Shekinah, female gender.
I told the Key West City Commission that, too.
Grandfossil
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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