Thanks =]
Carson is actually the reason I had this epiphany. I've felt oppressed by religion as a gay my whole life. But if we stop to think about it for a second, religion is basically oppressing everyone
Not in the same ways, or to the same extent necessarily, but I really think it does a huge amount of damage to straight people as well. And it makes perfect sense why a straight person who feels that their thoughts are constantly making them impure, and that they can't be as sexually free as they want to be, would then... Yep, want to oppress those who are more sexually free than they are. Like... the gays.
I've heard my whole life, "oh, they must be closeted if they feel that strongly against gays/marriage equality/etc," but I really think it's simpler than that. They are conditioned to live a vanilla life, have vanilla sex (and in extreme cases, not until marriage or strictly for procreation - like Carson), and then they see a colorful, bright, happy, free, sexually liberated community where people can explore all kinds of kinks, fetishes, role play, etc etc... So, it seems like it's a pretty natural path:
Religion oppresses EVERYONE and makes them feel ashamed to explore themselves and their feelings
-----> people either fall in line and accept it (a lot of cishet "god-fearing" folk/conservatives) or they have a sexual revolution, liberate themselves, and live happy, even if oppressed, lives (a lot of LGBT+ people who reach the point of self acceptance)
-----> the first group sees the freedom and happiness in the second group and lashes out as a coping mechanism because they're hurting and feeling caged by the religion they originally stuck with, and now feel forced to defend due to sunk cost and the life structures they've established (families, communities, etc)
-----> the second group feels unfairly targeted, oppressed, and decides to fight back with mockery (doing the cancan in full drag in cops faces at Stone Wall after said cops violently attacked them and raided their safe place) or violence (throwing bricks at those same cops)
-----> Stone Wall was just a small example of the same struggle happening on a national, and even global scale; sexually repressed religious defenders vs. the sexually liberated (these days it's meme battles and being increasingly mean to each other)
-----> fast forward to present day, and we see the effects of decades of one side wanting to shut down the other sides party vs. the party refusing to stop; the pain on both sides continues to grow, the levels to which each side are willing to escalate to keeps climbing, and now we're literally killing each other...
None of this shit today has anything to do with conservatives truly believing that a small immigrant child or a halftime show in Spanish are somehow a threat to their nation...
The conservatives are mad at the culture they live in for oppressing them and forcing them to constantly, exhaustingly defend insane stances - that they know are insane - but they can't abandon it for the same fear that we have in coming out - "if I show everyone who I really am, they'll no longer accept me."
They see that we as a community face the same EXACT fear they have, only we break through it and claim freedom, while they become slaves to it.
Religion is the root of SO MANY problems we have with each other, and we blame all kinds of insane other things, but it's religion. It's always been religion. And if you take away someone's freedom to have a sexually free life, they're going to be furious - some use that fury to liberate themselves, while some project that fury and blame others (unsurprisingly, the ones they blame are the ones who faced the same oppression but beat it - jealousy, resentment).
I know nobody's gonna read this shit but damn, it feels good to write out. Been having these thoughts for a while now and the Carson situation just made me realize how truly oppressed people like him are. Yeah, they've got tons of privilege, but they're also legitimately, truly, meaningfully oppressed.
And this.. this is the reason we need to love instead of hate. It's easy to hate someone who's coming after you and your rights. But when we think about all the little nuances of their circumstances, we truly do have a lot in common and maybe we can help them find the same liberation path we were fortunate enough to find for ourselves. Or at the very least, maybe we can just get them to stop trying to take our liberation away just because they aren't willing or able to claim their own.
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