Ham & Piety Pizza

I unreantiexdefriended FB acquaintance Richie Cohen the other day. He had linked to some QueerBot PizzaGate editorial—the sort of bitchy drag queen commentary that emphasized how "literally zero gay couples [plan] to serve pizza at their weddings"; I noted that it's really grating when rich New Yorkers decide to speak for All Teh Gays, even dirt-poor redneck bible-belt ones. Richie told me, not for the first time, to STFU.

Really? Nobody wants in on this here?

Listen up, 'cause I'm only going to say this one hundred thousand times:

We know homophobia is wrong. We are fully aware that queer-as-sin and queer-as-illness paradigms are antediluvian, unscientific, and plumb idiotic. We really don't need you to convene a circle jerk every time somebody makes one of those high-larious missteps the 'phobes inevitably seem to make (like the undead picking up martial arts skills).

I do understand that people need to be held accountable for their actions, regardless of the underlying basis for those actions. And I personally see zero excuse for protecting anyone's beliefs in the will of their invisible friends. When one of them succeeds in summoning their so-called "god" to speak for itself, then we can talk. Till then, I just don't see how any stupid fucking thing somebody chooses to believe should be off limits because human rights. (But that's a different argument...)

But in purely practical terms: If you respond to the owner of Memories Pizza and every other Murkin out there who has some kind of religious qualm with queer sexuality by shouting them down as haters and bigots and pricks (oh my!), you have thrown your own case. You are calling every fundamentalist not mistaken or misguided (and thus subject to argument or Damascene epiphany) but a liar—you are accusing them of consciously putting a religion mask over willful hatred. You are thereby doing to them ezzackly what they are doing to us when they insist we have chosen to be queer.

And so you are telling the world that you don't give a scrofulous ratfuck whether you overcome anyone's ignorance, religiously grounded or otherwise; it's far more important to preen your SJW headdress on FB for all to see. (In that light, a comparison to the military-industrial complex's M.O. is useful: "Continuously creating and strengthening enemies is a feature, not a bug."—Glenn Greenwald.)

Wow, and you actually made room to show you can still do the classism shuffle to belittle low-class pizza-serving faggots at the same time!

Good job, Richie & Co.!