The gumman didn’t kill Charlie Kirk. Kirk killed himself. The gunman just took away his wind pipe, for the sake of protecting the children. Charlie could have chosen to keep on living without it, but he decided to take his own life instead.

My stepfather once made the comment that Christians are the most discriminated against group in the USA. He said that to me, a gay man.

Now I’m absolutely certain that gay men are not the most discriminated against group in the USA, pretty high up the list, but not #1. On the flip side, the audacity of that bitch.

Ya’ll don’t know me in real life, so I’m going to explain that I’m probably the most even tempered and non-confrontational weirdo that most people who know me know, if that makes sense. Not perfect by any means, but I don’t let people know when shit gets to me unless I know them and trust them really well. And it took every ounce of self control I had not to make a scene. But I did make my point.

The problem is, when you have a group of people who have been indoctrinated since early childhood with a specific religion, and particularly when they’ve also been indoctrinated with conservative ideology, there’s just very little opportunity to make tangible progress in their beliefs. We literally and figuratively and wholly live in different realities. Theirs where magic and prayer and god are the solution and answer to everything, and mine that sees their points of view as illogical, unrealistic, hypocritical, and so on. I honestly am in a high degree of agreement with the philosophy that you can’t reason someone out of a thing they were never reasoned into because I have experienced it and I see it firsthand every day.

To be clear, I have no issue with super religious people or most religions. I just don’t think those are good reasons and frameworks to make sound, logical, and realistic decisions – particularly those that affect and bind other people.

I mean… He’s not wrong. I grew up in a fairly relaxed Christian church, where the emphasis was on the part of the Bible where Jesus says “don’t be a douchebag,” and “wait for them to die” was something they actually did.

For context, it wasn’t about anything bad. When I was a kid, the church kept voting on if they wanted to be Open & Affirming (basically just taking an official positive stance on lgbtq folks). The church was already lower case open and affirming - the minister’s son was gay, as was the organist, and everyone was cool with it - but they needed a majority vote to become upper case Open & Affirming. Every year, one bigoted old lady who only came to church on Christmas and Easter would get all of her friends to vote against it, and every year it would get voted down.

The organist got tired of it, and he left. The next year, the minister went too. The year after that, when it got voted down, an old man near the front stood up and called out that he wanted to move to vote on tabling the issue for ten years. His wife quickly seconded, and the council held the vote… Overwhelming yes.

For the next decade, the lgbtq crowd in the congregation actually slowly grew: the church’s official stance was always quietly avoided, and the old lady was never there to make them feel unwelcome… Speaking of whom, her poorly-attended funeral was held about eight years later, and her friends stopped coming to the annual meetings.

When the issue of becoming Open & Affirming was raised again, it passed by a wide margin.

this is true but christians also kill people all the time too

Amen.

I am reminded of a bible verse, Psalms 109:7-15