This could be titled: Parent Hell, Parent Heaven. WARNING: parts of this article are very disturbing.
“You know Kelly, I tell you what. If you die before me…you know what, when you get dead, we’re going to go through your house and we are going to strip it, and that girl won’t have a pot to piss in…you little hefer, you have put my life through hell. Gay shit. I hate gay shit. I am not going to live my life telling you that I believe in two women being married. It is not in the Bible, it is a damned SIN! And I am ashamed you live with a damn woman… You go straight to Hell! Go to Hell, Bitch!”
Kelly's mother has obviously had no feelings for her daughter ... ever.
Years after being kicked out of her home, Kelly met a wonderful woman named Leslie and they worked through the emotional trauma Kelly had suffered from her mother who had previously tried to "convert" Kelly with reparative therapy. In the meantime, Kelly resumed a sporadic communications with her mother although she was wary of anything deeper. Then tragedy struck: Kelly was felled by a severe case of lupus and her heart damaged (she is prone to heart attacks). Leslie has been her only support and the two have struggled through enormous medical bills.
Through her aunt, Kelly learned that her mother had been raising funds through her church, presumably to help Kelly or to at least visit Kelly during a hysterectomy operation. When Kelly received no funds nor any call from her mother about a visit, she decided to call her and tape the conversation as proof to her aunt that no money was forthcoming. What ensued was the terrible tirade above.
Bob Watson of LGBTQ Nation penned an open letter to Kelly's mother of which the most poignant of phrases is:
Your family is plagued with a woman suffering from a terrible disease. The disease is ugly, painful, debilitating and it ruins the heart. That woman is not Kelly, it is you. The disease is not the horrible one of Lupus which Kelly has, it is the disease of Homophobia that you have.
Bob also brought out the possibility that since Florida (where Kelly and Leslie now live) does not accept same-sex marriage, the mother's threat to leave Leslie without a "pot to piss in" is very real.
On The Other Side Of Reality:
If I had gay children: 4 Promises from a Christian Parent"
Rev. John Pavlovitz has struck a nerve amongst the Christian Right establishment: a Christian minister who would unconditionally accept homosexuality in his children could not possibly be Christian, could he? No "pray away the gay", no disowning, not a shred of righteous arrogance in his parenting strategy. His theology is so far from that of Kelly's mother as to be a different religion altogether. Then again, he's a Methodist and not a Southern Baptist.
Here are his 4 Promises:
1) If I have gay children, you’ll all know it.
My children won’t be our family’s best kept secret.
2) If I have gay children, I’ll pray for them.
I won’t pray for them to be made “normal”. I’ve lived long enough to know that if my children are gay, that IS their normal.
3) If I have gay children, I’ll love them.
I don’t mean some token, distant, tolerant love that stays at a safe arm’s length. It will be an extravagant, open-hearted, unapologetic, lavish, embarrassing-them-in-the-school cafeteria, kind of love.
4) If I have gay children, most likely; I have gay children.
If my kids are going to be gay, well they pretty much already are.
God has already created them and wired them, and placed the seed of who they are within them. Psalm 139 says that He, “stitched them together in their mother’s womb”. The incredibly intricate stuff that makes them uniquely them; once-in-History souls, has already been uploaded into their very cells.
His blog post is not only worth reading because of these points, but because of the extensive pro/con comments (some encouraging, some righteously hateful) it engendered.
October 7, is the 16th anniversary of the death of Matthew Shepard. One of the parents in this article is mired in a belief and an attitude that is still taking time to eradicate, while the other parent is forging ahead to a new, loving world. Matthew would be so proud of him. We should all be so very, very proud of him.
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