Thursday, August 5, 2010

Matthew Shepard - We Remember


Today's overturn of the horrendous Prop 8 that banned same sex marriages reminds us once again of Matthew Shepard. Elton John said once that he kept a picture of Matthew to remind himself every day that for the grace of God goes thee. Elton knew that if he had been a gay man in Wyoming that year, he too might also be dead.

Matthew died as a result of vicious anti-gay hate mongering. He was brutally beaten and left for dead in a Wyoming field tied to a fence post. This was a modern day lynching.

Matthew's legacy is one of hope. We hope that one day, young men like Matthew aren't beaten, tortured and killed for just being what they are.

We encountered this in our youth in high school and just couldn't imagine where the hatred, so thick you could cut it with a knife, was coming from. We told our male homophobic "friends" at the time this bit of wisdom we thought up on the spot: "You should go to bed every night and pray to God that he turns most men gay so that you'd have a shot at getting some women to actually have sex with you."

The look we got was priceless and we never heard another word again.

If you are a religious person who feels that being gay isn't just evil, but the perfect way to lose your soul to Satan, good for you. But keep it to yourself, your web blog, your little world. Do not go forth and try to purposefully ruin other people's lives because you don't believe in it.

We are vegetarian. We learned A LONG TIME AGO, that you can't tell people to go vegetarian. It's a personal choice that people have to make for themselves. Well, a gay person doesn't have a choice. God made them that way. And we don't think He makes mistakes.

Matthew Shepard.org

No comments: