Aug 29, 2022 08:27 PM
https://www.damemagazine.com/2022/08/29/...-rhetoric/
EXCERPT: . . . Seventeen years ago, Katrina hit New Orleans. Then the levees broke. We watched in a silence as thick as a roux, despair instead of flour, floodwater pouring in, thickening the air until the city crumbled under the weight. The levees broke, the city drowned, and my world ended. For the rest of my life, when I picture the Apocalypse, the end of days, I picture the waters pouring around shotgun houses.
I got through some of the stages of grief. Bargaining and denial, certainly. Depression? I crawled into the bottom of a bottle for a semester at the university in my hometown, drowning myself under alcohol almost as rapaciously as my adopted city drowned under water, neglect, and despair. I still don’t know if I’ve reached acceptance. But I did find anger. Anger at the state of the levees beforehand. Anger that more wasn’t done to evacuate the 9th ward. Anger at the federal response to the disaster. Anger at the universe. An anger that cut through the despair; a clarifying anger I have never let go.
That anger crystallized and focused on one group in particular, and as a result, for the last 17 years, I have kept a list. It is a list of pastors and preachers and spokespeople for religious organizations who blamed Hurricane Katrina on the “sin” in New Orleans. Those that said the city deserved it.
Purveyors of the notion that the hurricane was God’s judgment on the city, that the dead had it coming, that America had it coming, that, especially, the LGBTQIA+ community was and is such a moral abomination that God smote the city to punish it for supporting them.
That Southern Decadence, one of the largest celebrations of the gay community in the Crescent City, that opened my eyes to how much bigger and brighter and more beautiful the world could be outside of my small Missouri hometown, was why the city had to be destroyed. The idea that my gay, bisexual, and transgender friends, all of whom were scattered and hurting in the aftermath, were why New Orleans was drowned by their God.
Pat Robertson. Franklin Graham. John Hagee. Rick Joyner. Bill Shanks. Jennifer Giroux. Gerhard Wagner. John McTernan. Hal Lindsey. Charles Colson. Michael Marcavage. Rick Scarborough. Fred Phelps. A droplet of names out of a sea of hate.
Anti-LGBTQIA+ violence has always been a bedrock of Christian nationalists, and that the renewed fervor of it, combined with the ignoring of natural disasters and pandemics—or blaming them on LGBTQIA+ communities, as is happening with monkeypox—is not new, it is what the Christian right in this country does.
And as much as we like to think things have changed, that list? Those people? They are still at it... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: . . . Seventeen years ago, Katrina hit New Orleans. Then the levees broke. We watched in a silence as thick as a roux, despair instead of flour, floodwater pouring in, thickening the air until the city crumbled under the weight. The levees broke, the city drowned, and my world ended. For the rest of my life, when I picture the Apocalypse, the end of days, I picture the waters pouring around shotgun houses.
I got through some of the stages of grief. Bargaining and denial, certainly. Depression? I crawled into the bottom of a bottle for a semester at the university in my hometown, drowning myself under alcohol almost as rapaciously as my adopted city drowned under water, neglect, and despair. I still don’t know if I’ve reached acceptance. But I did find anger. Anger at the state of the levees beforehand. Anger that more wasn’t done to evacuate the 9th ward. Anger at the federal response to the disaster. Anger at the universe. An anger that cut through the despair; a clarifying anger I have never let go.
That anger crystallized and focused on one group in particular, and as a result, for the last 17 years, I have kept a list. It is a list of pastors and preachers and spokespeople for religious organizations who blamed Hurricane Katrina on the “sin” in New Orleans. Those that said the city deserved it.
Purveyors of the notion that the hurricane was God’s judgment on the city, that the dead had it coming, that America had it coming, that, especially, the LGBTQIA+ community was and is such a moral abomination that God smote the city to punish it for supporting them.
That Southern Decadence, one of the largest celebrations of the gay community in the Crescent City, that opened my eyes to how much bigger and brighter and more beautiful the world could be outside of my small Missouri hometown, was why the city had to be destroyed. The idea that my gay, bisexual, and transgender friends, all of whom were scattered and hurting in the aftermath, were why New Orleans was drowned by their God.
Pat Robertson. Franklin Graham. John Hagee. Rick Joyner. Bill Shanks. Jennifer Giroux. Gerhard Wagner. John McTernan. Hal Lindsey. Charles Colson. Michael Marcavage. Rick Scarborough. Fred Phelps. A droplet of names out of a sea of hate.
Anti-LGBTQIA+ violence has always been a bedrock of Christian nationalists, and that the renewed fervor of it, combined with the ignoring of natural disasters and pandemics—or blaming them on LGBTQIA+ communities, as is happening with monkeypox—is not new, it is what the Christian right in this country does.
And as much as we like to think things have changed, that list? Those people? They are still at it... (MORE - missing details)
