I've watched the conservative nonprofit Catholic Vote anti-gay PSA video a dozen times since it appeared in my news feed last night. My fiancé was upstairs watching CNN while I was in the dining room playing my guitar, surfing the web and drinking a glass of wine. Alright 3 glasses of wine, that's not the point. There in my home, on a very normal evening, were these earnest faces with glistening eyeballs expressing their need to oppress me and my future husband while not feeling shame. Of course, that's not how they see it. In fact, in a reverse summersault of logic they perceive themselves as the oppressed. "You are not alone!" an ingenuous looking girl tearfully exclaims while an Enya-esque score swells in the background.
For most it's easy enough to laugh off. It's a view point quickly fading into bigot history. So why am I torturing myself by playing it on a loop? Well, those are my people. My past. My hometown friends. I recognized the oblivious (albeit sincere) tone and insular reasoning in each of their pleas. They are each almost an archetype of some familiar character from my bizarro upbringing.
These aren't people who are in my life any more, of course. Many of them made a brief return when social media first began. But after a couple of dick jokes and one too many pro-Obama posts, most of them unfriended me. Or I unfriended them. It got soul-wearing to read their Chik-fil-a memes.
And that leads me to my point. All this unfriending. In the video they resort to the old "I have tons of gay friends" thing. Why do homophobes think they have so many gay friends? It's like they perceive their social circle as a circuit party. So many gay friends. Surely they don't believe that. But if they do, that's the problem.
I wondered if they all were sitting on my couch last night, smack plumb in the middle of all my domesticity while the man I will marry was falling asleep on the upstairs couch, if they could tearfully proclaim the same words without realizing what complete assholes they were being. The dowdy woman in the video is right, just not in the way she intended, when she said, "The best way to break down all these barriers is just to get to know people one on one."
Cue swelling orchestra.
Watch the video below: