Wednesday, September 26, 2007

79. WILLFUL IGNORANCE

From the Archives

(April 2005) SC voters will soon decide whether their state constitution should be amended to ban same-sex marriages. I grew up in the deep south, completed undergrad studies there, and can already tell you that their answer will be yes.

Sadly, I also know that many of the southerners in my extended family would vote to legalize this selective bigotry.

And speaking of the humid Carolinas, someone just emailed me to say that notorious homophobe Fred Phelps and his clan plan to protest a high school production of The Laramie Project near Duke University. This play is about the afteraffects of the savage death of Matthew Shepard, the twenty-one-year-old gay man who had recently moved to Laramie from nearby Chapel Hill, NC.

Phelps is the asshole who held up “God Hates Fags” signs at Shepard’s funeral and shouted to his mourning parents that their son was in Hell where he belongs.

(Cruel. And to do so in the name of Jesus! These homophobes have no decency and it is so deeply offensive that they couch their hatred in Jesus’s name.)

Phelps et al. show up in DC too, where their seething hatred is a sight to behold.

How will Dukies react to this show of hate? I'd like to think that kids in the art department will make paper-maché Jesuses with their arms around a gay couple and holding big “Hate Is Not A Family Value” signs. Or maybe Jesus can wear Reeses shirts and their placard can read “Look. They put their hatred on my Jesus” or something.

What rocks did these hate-filled people crawl out from under?

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