My eleven year-old son came home from school yesterday after having watched a movie about the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's.
It was horrible, he said.
As he described the church bombing, the hoses and the police dogs, he asked me, Why?
People who were in power wanted to stay in power. They wanted to beat them down but they fought back.
Jake, my youngest who is only eight, was listening to this conversation. After about an hour, he came up and asked me, "Why did they kill the girls that were changing their clothes?"
I said, They bombed the church. They didn't care who was inside.
He kept asking questions, throughout the rest of the day. Finally, I said to him, "You're trying to make sense of this. It doesn't make any sense."
Eleven gay bars in Seattle had ricin threats sent to them in the mail on Tuesday. Last night, hackers brought down a bunch of LGBT blogs.
"Pam's House Blend, RadicalRuss.com, American Liberalism, BeThink.org are some of the sites affected. I haven't gone down the whole Soapblox blogroll yet, so far it seems the state blogs were not affected; I assume the hack is restricted to only one server."
As I listened to my sons try and digest the horror of the Civil Rights movement, I wanted to say something about what is going on today in the LGBT movement. How transpeople all over the south are being killed with no real police effort to do anything about it. How Sean Kennedy's murderer is being set free after little time in jail.
How could I? How could I explain that people do hateful things to people who are different and that I, their mother, am one of the targets? Just because the one I am in love with, the one I want to spend the rest of my life with, share the responsibilities of adulthood with, share my bed with, is a woman instead of a man.
It doesn't make any sense. It's hateful and makes small people feel big. Three men gang raped a lesbian in Berkeley, California in December, and another man was beaten with a baseball bat yelling anti-gay, anti-hispanic slurs.
I do not believe it is fair to compare the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's to the LGBT movement of today. We have not reached the same level of visibility.
But we will. Hoses proved to be very unphotogenic- is ricin the new alternative?
Baseball bats have lurked in dark alleys for a long time for anyone deemed other enough to hate.
My kids cannot fathom people being beaten, killed because of the color of their skin. They try with questions, try to understand how someone could possibly be motivated to do such evil.
How do I explain falling in love could cost them their life?