Somewhere between the third and fourth hour of crying, I decided it was more useful to get out of bed and write about my anger.
It’s taken me two days to begin processing what happened early Sunday morning in Orlando. I still feel like I can’t really post about it because the hurt is too deep, the pain is too great to put into words. I am utterly confused, and the only prayers that have escaped my mouth so far are strung together by four-letter words. While I didn’t know anyone inside that building, I cannot stop being angry. It doesn’t have to happen to me, or anyone I know, to get how terrible this act of violence is.
They say that this could happen anywhere. Well, damnit, it has happened here. I may not have a bullet in me, but this has happened to all of us. LGBT people, the Latino community, Florida, the United States of America, to gun owners and non-gun owners, to believers and non-believers alike.
Stop waiting for yourself to be found inside that building, it has already happened to each of us. If we do not treat it that way, if we do not feel it down in our bones, nothing will ever change and then it will quite literally be us.
Against all of my urges to stay reserved, silence feels like a crime against God in this moment. I must speak.
June is Gay Pride Month. And the shooting in Orlando Sunday morning, as we’re well aware, happened at a popular gay club. I don’t know now and I may never know why this has happened. Whether it was aimed solely at LGBT or Latino people, whether it was religiously motivated, whether the shooter was delusional. Honestly, no “why” can ever possibly explain such senselessness.
But given what has happened, we must now grieve for those lost and with those so deeply scarred. And in their honor, we must do something better than typing words on a blog. We must claim responsibility now for changing what we can. Though it’s maddening to feel so helpless, we can affect this environment we have allowed up until now.
We must act if we consider ourselves human beings with hearts. Hearts not only pumping blood, but aching, aching to make this world a better place. These same hearts that are now pumping pain through each of our veins until we can’t bear to sit still any longer. I hope that you are one of these people who feels what I’m describing. I am speaking to you. Both you human beings inside the LGBT community, and especially those of you who are not. One particular group of people I have in mind: Christians.
That’s right. I didn’t write Muslims or gun owners or Obama or non-gun owners or whoever you’d rather I talk to instead. I am talking to you, Christian, whoever you are.
Whatever you believe about gay people (or black people or Jewish people or poor people or whoever is different from yourself), I don’t give one singular damn. Regardless of your personal views, I am asking you to accept and help everyone now. This is the only way to lighten our darkened world.
LGBT people deserve complete equality.
You don’t have to understand what it is like to be LGBT in order to help those who are. This radical concept is called being a good samaritan. You don’t have to agree with someone to support their right to be cared for.
I say support because there is too much baggage associated with the word love for me to use it here. Too many restrictions and qualifiers, too many ways we have to earn love or it is often followed by “I love you, but…” We are not good at loving when we turn a most pure word into a manipulative weapon.
Christian America, under the deceptive label of ‘religious liberty’, has created an environment demanding that certain individuals, such as LGBT people, exist alongside of but not fully participate in society. LGBT people can have jobs, that’s okay, but we do not protect those jobs if they profess their sexual orientation or gender identity. They can attend our churches, but cannot lead or take communion. They can be born into our families, but we often disassociate from them if they fall in love with the wrong gender; LGBT youth are still disproportionately homeless. They can donate blood, but only if they have been celibate for an extended period of time. The list of discriminations is shorter than it used to be, yet still too infuriatingly long to list.
Forget about love. Apparently that’s not working. Instead, I am asking for your support. Let’s be clear, I am not asking for your opinion. If I am to be the man that God called me to be, I must follow my own truth, not yours.
When someone asks me why they should follow their truth even when the road appears impassable ahead, it takes all of me to think of a single reason why it’s worth the long walk towards home.
I think of an almost 31-year-old man who grew up in a Christian household which taught him that he was innately flawed. A man who struggled with whether he deserved to live simply because his church pointed to seven translated verses from an ancient script and said that it defined him. A man who fought for nearly three decades to prove that he was worthy, only to discover he had nothing to prove all those years.
That man is me. And I refuse to let others believe that their life is worth any less because of who they love. Planting such negative stories within our children’s heads is mental and emotional abuse caused if not by hate, then even more dangerously by ignorance.
If you love God with your whole body, soul and mind, you must educate yourself. Christian America has an enormous voting and buying power, and yet it is most often employed to hurt others in order to promote itself.
What I am asking for is this: Get over the gay thing. The sexual orientation or gender identity of a person does not describe whether a person is good or bad. And supporting LGBT people not only creates a better, more diverse and inclusive world, but it also enables LGBT individuals to live healthier lives, with lower homelessness rates, less depression and suicide, less of a separated culture, more self-worth, and with stronger faith and family bonds.
We must do this by writing discrimination protections into workplace, housing and medical laws immediately.
We must do this by giving LGBT individuals full-access into our churches, without qualifiers and without forcing them to remain silent. I would go further in saying that our churches have a moral responsibility to reach out and help LGBT people now.
We must do this by voting for politicians who preach inclusion and equality and who have a track record of working towards these ideas. We cannot vote for Donald Trump or even get relaxed with hearing such hateful rhetoric.
We must do this by donating time, resources and energy to organizations who are actively providing support to the LGBT community.
And for God's sake, we must write and write and write and write and vote and vote and vote and vote until common sense gun laws are in place. And we cannot stop even when the NRA buys or brainwashes our government and friends.
Today I am not asking for your love, as wonderful as that is. Today I am asking for your support.
Let's get to work.