Queer as a Three Guinea Bill

…the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us…

—Virginia Woolf

Forgive me for being so contemplative and reticent about responding to your conservative rhetoric. Here you have dangled the so-called welfare queen in front of me and asked how we can continue to provide safety nets to the less fortunate when clearly your stereotype serves to remind me that any person “on the dole” as you like to say is just a shyster gaming the system. And this is just the tip of your ideological iceberg. I have come to understand that you do not understand why gay couples should marry, why we should put environmental protections in place, why we should reconsider gun-control laws, why we should regulate corporations, why we should invest in education, why we should offer health care reform, why we should tend to — dare I say it? — women’s issues and, in general, why we should do anything that is beneficial to anyone besides what I would call the privileged class of conservatives living in their glass houses.

            Forgive me for not responding sooner. For we, in many ways, share similar experiences here in the present that are far removed from what germinated our political beliefs. I read stories to my son before bed, and so do you, or so I imagine. We equally shake our heads in confusion and dismay when presented with a Miley Cyrus video. You eat wings with blue cheese dressing; I eat wings with blue cheese dressing. Moreover, we all claim to be thinkers, to be interested in how we can make our country a better place. But… those three dots mark a precipice, a gulf so deeply cut between us that…I have been sitting on my side…wondering whether it is any use to speak… Because, frankly, I think all of your conservative sputtering is just a politically and pseudo-religiously convenient way to validate your intolerance for anyone who isn’t white. Yeah. I’m being pejorative about that word, meaning anyone who is different, whether skin tone or otherwise, from your narrowly defined concept of what constitutes “American.”

You see, I was raised by a woman who, though young, thought she was making good decisions about love and her future, and instead found herself a single mother. Then it happened again. She met a man who, though he liked to cut loose, seemed ready to settle down into family life. Boy, was she wrong! Then my mother became a single mother of three children, all because she thought she could change a man. But I know what you must be thinking. She was clearly to blame. And her three children? The ones who, for part of the time, had to rely on government assistance for basic needs such as food? Well, according to your agenda, if a mother has somehow fucked up, so then, too, should her children pay for her poor (only in retrospect) decisions. So, too, should they be fucked by inheritance or otherwise.

Thus you claim to be Christians, but in reality, you’re just Darwinists in disguise. You say I love Jesus but then espouse a magical up-by-your-bootstraps mentality, which has worked for .001 percent of the public who were, as a matter of birth, born at rockbottom. You’re really all about survival of the fittest, but can’t admit as much, so you like to trot out the one black guy you know who beat the odds. Then you say, if he did it, so can you, but you fail to scrutinize his story, fail to recognize that he was the lucky one, the one who had a grandmother who pulled for him, who had a publicly-funded community center that kept him out of trouble, who had a clever mind and an against-all-odds imperative to not just survive, but to thrive. Who was part of the middle class. Spare me the pandering. Spare me the black republicans, the gay republicans, and the Phyllis Shlaflys. They are only representative of rare and narrow truths. 

Furthermore, you claim that you have gay friends, but if they were really your friends and not just people you shared cake with for office birthdays, you would recognize the love they have for their partners as just the same as you have for your wife (I’m pegging you as male. As white male.). If you took any environmental considerations to heart you might recognize that if you don’t do something about fossil fuel consumption now, then that son of yours, the one you like to read to, might be pretty cold in the future when he has to, by necessity, ration oil during the bitterest winters. And if we don’t come up with thoughtful gun regulations, that son of yours might be in the wrong school at the wrong time with the wrong, armed classmate. And if we leave corporations to themselves, we might forget that even if moral people function within the office parks and skyscrapers, a corporation is, by its nature, an unwieldy machine built to churn out profits. And if we fail to invest in an educational infrastructure, then any child not born into privilege must first figure out what bootstraps are because he or she never heard of them, doesn’t know where to find them, and has never been instructed on how to install and use your stupid, fucking bootstraps. And, and, and… I am reminded of the Elvis Costello song, “Tramp the Dirt Down.” Do you know it? It’s written to Margaret Thatcher, one of your people, and the last verse goes like this: Well I hope you live long now/ I pray the Lord your soul to keep/ I think I'll be going/ before we fold our arms and start to weep/ I never thought for a moment/ that human life could be so cheap/ But when they finally put you in the ground/ they'll stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down.

So I guess I’ll just end this here.