I’ve had it with the election.
I’ve had it with being told it’s a however-many-horse race, as if somehow the party saying this is in any way convincing me that I should vote for them. On the contrary, I get angry when someone underscores the lack of real freedom or democracy in our electoral system.
And I’m full up to my back teeth with oleaginous, power-craving politicians grinning and spinning their way across every news distribution channel, taking potshots at each other and presuming to say what they’ll do with our money given the chance.
And then there’s the gay thing: I want to scream at the ceiling whenever a politician uses homosexuality to advance his platform, either by pretending to befriend us when it’s convenient (yet making sure we stay in a readily identifiable separate category), or using the fear-stick to point at us and our world-conquering, family-destroying, society-filthying motives.
The latest round of this is Ayrshire’s Conservative candidate airing his view that we’re all on a spectrum from “unfortunate” to “wrong”, and that, if elected, he’d do his best to make sure we don’t “promote” our lifestyles to children. I’m not even going to bother trying to counter that idiot argument; all I can say is that the closest thing I have to a “gay agenda” is a little handmade book in which I schedule to-do items for my work and my social life with my partner (which, as often as not, involves us visiting our straight friends who have babies). Happily, the “nasty party”, alarmed that this thug has said out loud what the rest of them think in private, has suspended him.
I don’t want to promote my personal life to anyone — though Gawd knows it would have helped me when if someone had done that where I could have seen it when I was little. All I want from politicians is that they leave me the hell alone and not abuse gay people to score points. The same goes with the news media, who constantly hit the bee’s nest of intolerance to generate stories from thin air, with no thought of how the ensuing hatred might hurt real people’s lives.
Leaders lead with vision, the unimaginative and despots lead with fear.
