Grooming Hate

 Something has been really bothering me, but I haven't been inspired to put it to paper (or in a text document) until now.

In one corner, we have LGBTQ+ accepting parents and their children.

In the other corner, we have conservative, church-going parents and their children.

And yet only one of these groups is labeled, by the other, "groomers."

One of these groups has been lobbying, over the past several years, to remove certain books from school libraries and classrooms, passed or otherwise advanced legislation criminalizing the other group, going so far as to separate loving parents from their children in the name of family values, and finally, perpetrating violent terrorism against the other group (see: Club Q in Colorado just two days ago, the Pulse Nightclub in Florida in 2016).

What bothers me most about what is happening is that the wrong group is being labeled "groomers." In what universe is the Church (Catholic or evangelical) not an institution of power and indoctrination? In other words, the institution of Christianity itself is an artifice built to disseminate and preserve specific traditions and values belonging to a specific culture; its very purpose is incontrovertibly to "groom" its members and their children in order to preserve its own existence.

Conversely, LGBTQ+ parents do not belong to any similar institution; in fact, I would argue that no such institution exists that can pass on or in any way indoctrinate children into any kind of specific belief system; nearly everyone I have encountered who is LGBTQ+ has embarked on a journey--intellectual, interpersonal, sexual, medical--of self-discovery after figuring out that they do not belong in whatever situation in which they find themselves. The only role of their parents, in this situation, was either to choose to support or choose to disavow them (dealing incalculable psychological damage in favor of something so insignificant as their personal religious or moral convictions in the face of their own children, who only seek their love and approval in who they chose to have relationships with) as they metamorphized into their more authentic selves.

I can think of no greater crime than that of teaching one's children to hate another group of people, but, for many, this has become the role of the Church even as they project that toxic, false word at their very targets. 

Making matters much worse, the beliefs of the Church proliferate amongst weak-minded people, and eventually manifest themselves through violence; and while the violence itself may lack any kind of specific source or association, the reality of stochastic terrorism remains. The fog of plausible deniability and myth of "lone wolf" terrorism obscures Dostoevsky's greatest and most important lesson: Beliefs beget action. It doesn't quite matter who inspired the person who attacked Pulse or Club Q; it doesn't quite matter who compels certain parents to take books away from other people's children; what matters is that the volume of these beliefs is rising, and with it the threshold for these beliefs to manifest in violence.

There is one group I specifically want to address, because I believe that they are the most vulnerable, and the ones whom the Right specifically targeted in order to wedge themselves an opening with which to attack other groups of people. Trans people are the least understood and the most maligned of all groups in the GLBTQ+ spectrum, and they deserve far more attention and support. They are being attacked and murdered at such alarming rate that there is a Trans Day of Remembrance for all of those who have been attacked and killed in hate crimes.

The Right exploited the public's uncertainty about trans people (and, to be frank, the uncertainty of other LGB people) in order to create an opening through which they could attack other letters in the acronym. Attacks on trans people through both legislation and physical and verbal violence have led invariably to attacks on lesbians, gays, queer people, and, also, Jews, who remain the Right's eternal bogeyman. 

The point that I am trying to make, and tragically, it takes me saying it for others to understand it, is that hatred against one group invariably invites hatred toward other--or even all--groups. Once it becomes acceptable to malign a socially vulnerable minority, it is only a matter of time before someone feels emboldened enough to malign yet another socially vulnerable minority. That old Holocaust era poem is as cliched as can be, but it is abundantly clear that we have yet to absorb its lesson.