A Service of Rainbow Law

Bigotry, Hate And My Sister

Written by rexymeteorite Thursday, 04 March 2010 07:26

It is hard to keep quiet and stand by while someone you love is being berated by a known bigot. Its hard for me to just keep silent while my sister, who is a wonderful person, has to experience adversity on a level not meant for anyone to deal with. In her short 18 year life she has experienced so much strife already, why would someone want to make it any worse? Why would a person knowingly espouse anti-GLBT sentiments to a person who has lesbian parents?

Why? What is the point? What does this person gain from her own hatred? Where is the line drawn in the sand? My heart is filled with so much distaste for this person I feel like opening up and unleashing all of the pain experienced by my family over the 20 years its been in existence. My sister is the most wonderful person in the world, how dare someone do this to her?

My sis and I have experienced a lot of bad times together. In short, we went through hell and back and came out of it sane and rational people. When I was eight, and she was three, we were kidnapped by my father because HE believed that lesbians shouldn't be raising kids. He forced his beliefs on our family, and for three months while I was in my fathers care he starved us, drank himself into a stupor nightly, left us in the care of a bunch of sixteen year old while they were doing meth, emotionally abused us, and some nights he left ME (an eight year old) alone with my sister to take care of her while both my dad and my crazy ex-step mom went out and played bingo all night.

 

Despite our negative childhood experiences, my mother and her partner (my other mom :]) worked their asses off to make sure the children in my family had food our stomachs, clothes on our backs, and a roof over our head. They both got up at 2 o'clock in the morning and ran a paper route consisting of over 250 papers a night to pay off a medical bills that I had accrued during my bout with the ultra-rare necrotizing fasciitis (flesh eating virus) while it was in its fourth and final stage in my eighth grade year. That bill alone, for four days in the hospital, was 50,000 dollars. My mom had also accrued over 10,000 dollars in legal expenses trying to get my sister and I back from my backstabbing father. And in 1996 when the minimum wage was something like $5.15/hr. Oh, I didn't mention my mom worked two minimum wage jobs + the paper route just to keep our family afloat? Well, she did. My mom and her partner paid off all of her debt, and saved up a nice nest egg for themselves. Most would consider them  "middle class" now but there was a time in my childhood when the only thing we could be classified as was "poor beyond all recognition"

 

And yet the hatred and bigotry of some people never ceases to amaze me. Despite overcoming nearly all the challenges and tribulations my family faced, we still to this day do not have the respect that most families do. We still to THIS FUCKING DAY do not have validation. We still TO THIS MOTHERFUCKING DAY are accosted for our choice to come together and simply love one another.

 

This brings me to my story.

 

My sister, Brittany, is a chef at a major fast food chain. She is doing well in the position, getting 30 hours a week (for an 18 year old in THIS economy, damn she is doing well for herself), and loving every minute of her job. Recently, a new cook was hired to cover the night shift and about a week after the new girl was hired, she started to show her bigot stripes.

 

A couple of things for me to add to the story: The bigot chef is a friend of my fiancee's she recently dumped in the dust for accusing me of, among other things, doing meth. She made this assumption because she knows I am a liberal, and in her family the old saying goes "If they're a lazy liberal, they are probably on drugs". Well, in short, my fiancee was furious and dumped her like a sack of potatoes.

 

One day my sis and this new person are talking, and the conversation takes a turn for the worse. The new chef begins to spew her religious and anti-GLBT screed and my sister kept quiet during the whole conversation. Some examples my sis gave me (these are direct quotes now): "100% of gay marriages fail", "Gays deserve to rot in hell", and just general "fucking faggot fairies" and stuff along this thought pattern.

 

Well, that saturday, my fiancee, her sister (who also works at the fast food chain), and my sister were all driving my little Chevy Aveo around and Brittany mentions her conversations with her new co-worker. By the time she is finished talking, my face and neck look like a cherry tomato. My sister asked me if I was okay, and I start to tear up a little. She leans in from the back seat and tells me that its going to be okay.

 

My questions to her: Why didn't you say anything? Why would you just put up with that? Did you talk with your supervisor?

And the answers to those questions came, and it made the misty eyes worse. She said "Adam, I love my job. I don't want to make things uncomfortable. You know our family isn't accepted by most people, and I have learned to just keep quiet"

 

That answer blew me away. She is so spot on, and so intelligent for being an 18 year old who is just now finding out the realities of life. A younger me would have yelled at the top of my lungs and gotten myself fired. But still this begs the question: Why should people's "acceptance" of my mothers lifestyle have any negative bearing on anyone? The only person who has to accept my mother's lifestyle is my mother. Brittany shouldn't have to sit around while this bigot tells her her parents are going to "rot in hell". She shouldn't have to sit there and keep her mouth shut when this chef calls an openly gay man a "fairy faggot", and yet it is so.

 

The thing that is bothering me about this situation is that I desperately want to message this new chef on facebook and tell her what I really feel but I don't want to make it awkward for my sis at work. So, I guess the tradition of silence when it comes to bigotry and hate is preserved, but that doesn't prevent me from posting a diary about it.

 

I want all you religious bigots out there to realize this: Hell ain't a place, its a mindset. And you've have WILLINGLY PUT YOURSELF THERE. WILLINGLY. WITH NO ONES HELP.

 

Oh and if you wanna find out more about my parents I wrote a diary about them about a year ago

Read the original article in The Daily Kos

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