Cheated by Trump? SHOCK!
What’s this strange emotion? A sudden surge of . . . what? Sympathy? Toward religious fanatics, home-grown haters and gimlet-eyed keyhole-peering revanchists. Is that it? Well, pity, anyway.
I mean, man, that’s gotta hurt. You betray your country, handing control over to a notorious bully liar, fraud and buffoon in the casual way you’d toss your car keys to the village idiot, saying “Here, take ’er for a spin.”
You betray your faith, falling in line by a staggering majority — 81% of evangelicals — to cast your ballot for a thrice-married con man, casual bigot and serial ignoramus. You crowd auditoriums to shriek in rapture over this church-avoiding, lie-spewing, norm-shredding, sniffy abomination of all that is holy, a shambling, rambling, stumbling refutation of the very idea of grace, dignity or living a spiritual life. And for what?
The idea was: you sign away your support to this Apprentice Archfiend, this strip-mall Satan, and he rewards you by picking Supreme Court justices who will sprinkle juridical fairy dust over the United States and magically transport it back to the Mayberry 1958 of your imaginings. The court will protect the notional babies you claim to so adore, and drop-kick all those other — brrr, shudder — unacceptably different folks back in the far shadows where they belong. Ah, hahahahahahahahahaha. And then he . . . and then he . . . excuse me, inhaled a little coffee there, guffawing . . . he turns around and betrays you, or his Supreme Court does anyway, on a cloudless Monday in June.
C’mon, laugh along, hard though that may be drenched in soda water, pants yanked around your knees, the calliope wheezing away, derisively. No? Not laughing?
Need I repeat the news? The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against — against — your God-given right to sack anybody whose sexual orientation or gender identity makes you feel, well, nudged out of your safe happy place.
The court said, in essence, that the same laws that say you can’t fire a woman for being a woman mean you can’t fire a woman who was born a man and then transitioned just because her existence makes you sad.
Weeping certainly rose up from the valley. Stone-cold hater Franklin Graham paused from hawking jars of his 190-proof bigotry, stopped affixing labels reading “Mah Faith” and selling the swill to anyone with a valid credit card, to decry the ruling.
The decision “erodes religious freedoms across this country,” the moral moonshiner moaned on Facebook.
Sure, if you consider your religion a bludgeon to apply to the heads of anyone you’d like to keep down (remember: gays are receiving this abuse now only because it became less fashionable to deploy faith as an ally to bullying and oppressing African Americans. But the same God whom some today claim doesn’t want them to employ a transgender person not long ago smiled and winked at white supremacy and segregation).
“Christian organizations should never be forced to hire people who do not align with their biblical beliefs . . .”
Stop right there. Why does Franklin reserve this right to “Christian organizations”? Don’t Jewish organizations enjoy the same rights? Shouldn’t I be able to fire my secretary after discovering a box of Christmas cards in her desk drawer? Would Graham support me? Does he really feel I “should not be prevented from terminating a person whose lifestyle and beliefs undermine” my own “purpose and goals?” My number one purpose and goal being to live in a nation where laws are not set to harmonize with the prejudices of backwoods snake-handling haters.
Or does that work just for him? Do you have a yardstick? Because I would like to measure how thick a layer of hypocrisy Franklin Graham needs to slither through the dry moral boneyard of his bartered ethical life.
Oh, I’m running out of room. There there. Here’s a hankie. I didn’t mean to make you cry. But you should have known, before you gave your political credit card to a notorious grifter: He cheats everyone who plays. Even you.
It’s hard to be laughed at, and I’m sorry to do it. But you know what’s even harder? Getting fired for who you are, for your sexuality, for a quality that has nothing to do with your job. That’s unfair. What isn’t unfair is that when history finally takes a paper towel and, gagging, scrapes up the legacy of Donald Trump, all his fans will be right there alongside him, where they’ve always wanted to be.