Agreeing to disagree with human rights gets phrased as a difference of opinion. But opinion relates to preferences and aversions, not to human rights issues that leave others marginalized and keep yourself elevated. Liking vanilla doesn’t give you an advantage over people who like chocolate. But when your opinions are used to take away the rights of others to elevate yourself, then you are just a bad person who lacks moral fortitude.
Right now, Christians are requiring students in Texas to read the Bible. If a similar requirement were made by any other religion, Christians would be up in arms. Not figuratively, but with guns and hate, stringing Black kids up by trees while the news calls it a suicide. One conversation with someone impacted by this will tell you what really happened. It is what happens when people are dragged off to a detention center and held in 2×2 boxes in extreme heat, forced to sit in their own feces without food or water for up to two days. Not in Auschwitz, but homegrown in America, right in the asshole of Florida. Children. Disabled people. American veterans. Elderly. Pregnant mothers. And that guard says nothing. Compliant. Complicit. They have a fear of loss of power, loss of advantage.
Who are they. They are the people who were like family but abandoned me upon coming out. Family, friends, people I care about. They are the adults who stood idly by as they watched someone’s rights infringed, or watched unkindness be done, and said nothing. They are the ones who knew. And said nothing anyway. They perpetuate misinformation knowingly, because they are truly culpable. They use that misinformation as fodder for scare tactics and legislation to keep us under the boot of the oppressor. And they are the systems that let it exist, because they were built that way. Our neighbors are being killed by police because someone is brown or Black or speaks another tongue in addition to English. Their own bilingualism shows further knowledge, yet the one who knows English and wears pale skin while hiding behind a badge holds a gun, just itching to pull the trigger.
I know this because I was drinking the Kool-Aid. I was part of that system and I truly believed in it. Sitting in the pews, standing and kneeling, standing and kneeling, singing songs at the top of my lungs, proclaiming love for a man I never knew, saying prayers with words that meant things I had no idea I was even saying. Amen. Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. It all brings a sense of community, but it also has aspects of cult and manipulation. I didn’t recognize that as a kid. I just saw that we were going on retreats to do good, working service centers like United Cerebral Palsy, food camps, construction sites, disaster relief, a food kitchen we held regularly. When you’re stuck in it, it all just seems wonderful.
Then I started to ask questions, and that is when it unraveled. When you ask questions, priests and pastors tell you it is supposed to bring you closer to God, or that doubt is some sort of sin in itself. When I brought up my feelings about my sexuality to a priest, I was told that I would be burning in hell. That got me questioning. Why would a God who made me this way make me burn in hell. Even the logic of Christianity got lost in me. The promise of something no one has ever seen, promised in a definite way: that if you are a good person you will end up somewhere with everything you’ve ever dreamed of, but if you’re a bad person it will be suffering and hell. It’s far-fetched, especially when you know that we Catholics, Christians in general, stole the mythology from other religions and stole the rituals. But when you’re sitting there drinking wine and eating bread, smelling incense, holding hands, watching a dramatic reenactment of the crucifixion, you find yourself lost in the magic created by a really well-designed system meant to keep people doing what they’re told, under the guise of a big strong powerful guy in the sky who will smite you if you’re bad and don’t believe in him, but if you believe in him you’ll be saved. Being saved is required to be a Christian, but you have to be a Christian in order to be saved. And it’s often been done by force, or indoctrination, or putting kids in schools like we did with Native American kids, raised by nuns.
I sang the Ave Maria in that choir, very excited I got a solo. I was active in the church because it gave me a sense of belonging, until I knew that belonging cost other people things. The people in my church were never going to see that, because their blindness kept them there, and it was willful. If you have any level of critical thinking and you sit there and unravel Christianity, it’s very easy to watch it fall apart without any effort. Most people avoid the effort because of our fear of the unknown, because of how we approach existential crises when faced with our own mortality. It’s wild that people would rather be cowards in their fear, so much so that they’re willing to keep others oppressed and keep believing in the best-selling fiction of all time, basically stolen from other authors and plagiarized. Every single story written under a gospel was written by somebody who chose to say they were John or Luke or Matthew, because it seemed more credible than saying he was Fabio from Rome.
I didn’t know, when I was reading it, that it was going to become a tool to legislate trans bodies. Queerness was something I heard people talk about: we don’t hate the gay people, we just hate that they’re gay. That hate the sin, not the sinner bullshit. So whether or not they know how their religion impacts trans people, they can see how the Bible is being used in the public sphere to justify anti-LGBTQ legislation. And it’s not just trans people. Christianity, and Christian nationalism in particular, is being used to further oppress people from Latinx communities, brown people, people from the Middle East and Asia. Anybody who isn’t the color of a saltine, anybody who isn’t eggshell white, deserves to be kept under the boot of Jesus Christ.
They quote the parts of the Bible that are convenient while leaving out the parts that condemn what they do in their daily lives. Half of Leviticus condemns most of what Americans do daily. It forbids wearing clothes of combined fibers. It forbids trimming the edges of your beard. It forbids pork and shellfish. It forbids tattoos. They wear the blended shirt to church and eat the ham after the service, and they would never be okay with being punished for an unkempt beard the way that book prescribes. There are so many versions too, the King James, the New Revised Standard, all these reiterations written to keep people reading, purposefully written to perpetuate the beliefs of the current time. Jesus Christ would be so disappointed, because these people have never read his word yet claim his name. It reeks of self-righteousness dressed up as virtue, and they keep the incense burning so they don’t have to smell what’s underneath. It’s willful, cultivated stupidity, and it’s affecting the lives of people who don’t deserve it. Our country was supposed to protect us from this kind of religious influence, but it was never written for anyone other than white men.
Christian nationalism has way too much influence. Look at the Heritage Foundation and the Project 2025 disaster. Trans people were first on the list to be targeted, alongside the Latinx immigrant community, and it’s being done in the name of protecting family values, or how God only created man and woman, or how man should not lay with man as he lays with woman. They call it unnatural, say it’s against God, condemn it in the name of Jesus, and when questioned they just cite Bible verses that mean nothing, or lean on research organizations that exist to produce evidence for conclusions they’ve already reached. We’re seeing it in real time. We just saw the Supreme Court take away the ability for trans people to compete in sports that reflect their gender identity. Youth are unable to receive proper trans care, because people are being given misinformation, being told it has to do with godliness.
It’s starting to feel like we’re out of The Handmaid’s Tale and the country is turning into Gilead. They’ve come for the rights of women, removing reproductive rights, criminalizing abortion, making it a felony, in some states worthy of capital punishment. We even saw a state where men were going to be given the capacity to kill a spouse who had an abortion. I believe it wasn’t passed, but the fact that the legislation could be brought up at all shows exactly where this is going. There’s the poem: they came for so-and-so and I said nothing, and then they came for me and it was too late. That’s where it’s going, for whoever challenges their worldview. It’s starting with Latinx and queer and womb-bearing people. The types of victims haven’t changed. The names of the oppressors and the forums have been given new names, but the villains all carry the same dark badge of Jesus Christ.
So do something with the anger this should be giving you. Show up to the school board hearing when they vote the Bible into the curriculum. Back the ACLU cases fighting the sports bans and the detention conditions. Call your reps before the next state bill gets to the floor, not after. Silence is the thing they are counting on, and it is the one thing we do not have to give them.
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So here is the pivot. I am doing my best. I am trying my hardest. I have been writing poetry and short stories and articles that express my lived experience and stand up for voices that have been silenced, with the boot being pushed on my neck, in a country where half of it wants me dead every time I walk out of the house. If I sit in this sorrow, in this oppression, in this darkness they’ve placed me in, they win. They are doing exactly what they set out to do, keeping me down. But I will continue to stand up. I will use my pen as a sword. I will use my voice as a screeching alarm to silence their echoing hate. I will not stand down, and we will not stand down, and we will always be here, and they cannot stop us until the last one of us stops breathing. We will never be gone, because we will never stop existing, and that in and of itself is a war cry.
They mistake our softness for weakness. The sheep will not convince us that we are anything but lions. Their crosses, their Bibles, their holy water, all of their piety will do nothing for them when all of us are six feet under, bodies rid of pulse and signal, just bones in the ground with no story to be told except the mark we left behind. So no, we are not agreeing to disagree. That door is closed. Agree and grow, or stay unchanged and be a stain on humanity. We are over it. We are not asking anymore. We will prevail. We will roar, and they will be left to be worn as our glistening red, wool-stained coats of victory.
By Gemma Flora Ortwerth
Gemma Ortwerth 
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