This is not me ranting. This is not strictly a pro-gay piece or an anti-religion piece. This is me questioning the rather questionable humans that act conspicuously inhumane and make me lose faith in humanity. If you don’t catch onto the wordplay in that sentence I feel sorry for you.

This is me, do you see me? I am the thirteen year old girl swamped in too big clothes, greasy unwashed hair hanging in my face. I am the short, poorly dressed figure in between two tall, fashionable, albeit strange, ones, a herd of fellow outcasts walking a few feet behind us. Poking along, picking the flowers, stopping to watch a cloud float by, it should be fairly obvious to you that I do not want to reach the school gates. The path we are using winds through a child’s play park, deserted this early in the morning. The cement reaches right up to the edge of our school’s back entrance, one far away from any adults that would be keen on defending us, baby-stealing, child-corrupting, blood-sucking teenagers. This is important, because another party wants reign over the gate.

“One man, one woman!”
“No gay marriage!”
“GOD HATES FAGS!!!”

The time leading up to voting day was a particularly nasty one if I may say so, most prominently regarding Proposition 8. Oh sure, it didn’t pass, we know that now. There was about a 4% difference in the votes. But right here we had been caught in the crossfire of a battle we didn’t have permission to fight. Why? Hardly any of us were of voting age. If the adults wanted to be at each other’s throats over who should torture themselves with marriage and who shouldn’t, then fine, whatever. The issues don’t effect people nearly as much as they would like them to, and they especially didn’t effect us. We were more worried about our algebra test, or the essay we knew we had finished the night before but still didn’t seem like it would be good enough. Why bother us?

Alas, I do not know. Maybe because we are vulnerable. Maybe because we made good targets.

Purple faced protesters armed with big angry signs and American flags stood in a line across the entrance to our school, an alternative institution that many gay teenagers happened to attend. As we got closer they looked nearly as nervous as I know we were. Or at least, as nervous as I was. Sometimes, I have to wonder if people can differentiate between hatred and fear. These people did not look like they wanted to kill my friends in cold blood. They looked terrified. Terrified of this mass of sixteen year olds prancing towards them, all dangly earrings and hand painted clogs.

“They look a bit stiff, do you think I should break up the tension by asking one out on a date?” Troy asks me. My best friend, my bodyguard, and my fellow shoe fetishist. And this is why I like him so much. Thirty people and their bratty spawn, who aren’t old enough to be in kindergarten yet but can still take part in an anti-gay protest, are screaming that he will go to Hell for his sexual preference, and he is telling me that the man in the green shirt isn’t nearly as hideous as the rest of them. He doesn’t care, he isn’t bothered, he laughs at their lack of fashion sense and rolls his eyes at their narrow-mindedness. While I stand by and wonder what possesses people to be so cruel.

Everybody has their own beliefs and is entitled to their own opinion, I understand that completely. I understand that my best friend is gay and that he was born that way, regardless of what some people may be compelled to believe. I understand that an enormous amount of people do not believe homosexuals deserve equal rights because they are ‘committing crimes against Nature and against God’. I understand that both sides are very angry, very loud, and are only human, therefore prone to making mistakes, and I understand that it is quite possible that we are all completely and utterly wrong about what God wants, or if there even is a God in the first place.

But there is something that I do not understand. I do not understand some people, a specific type of people. The type of people that stands on the sidewalk, or in front of a school. And not only do these people stop other people from getting along with their lives, they stand and scream at people and tell them how to go about their lives. I have to wonder, under what circumstances do people feel captivated to tell other people what they are doing wrong. What comes over a person? What line does a person cross? What kind of a person does that? Who are these people that stand by shouting so angrily without having their facts straight, or any facts at all for that matter? They have no right. Oh, certainly they have privileges issued to them by the government that they get to keep as long as they do not threaten anybody. But what gives them the right to tell other people how to live? Where do they get off making other people miserable? They stand. And they shout. And they point their fingers a lot, and they shake their signs. And they demand that the queers go to Hell, or that the rape victims keep the babies they never asked for nor wanted, or that a strip club be closed because it is offense or a book be banned because it depicts life as what it is.

What kind of a person lives their life, using all the time they have been given on this Earth, to go out and make other people feel like shit?

God may hate homosexuals. I do not know. God may love them. God may even be homosexual himself, or there might not even be a God. But if there is a God…how do you suppose he feels about these fools with their big angry signs, making Him look foolish and spiteful and incredibly stupid? I imagine that He would not be too happy about them, because, since when does standing on the sidewalk with an American flag tied around your waist, a large sign over your head, and Bible versus spouting out of your mouth, in between vastly offensive terms for gays of course, make you any better a person?

It doesn’t, not by any means.

Troy knew this. He sauntered right up to the crowd like a model, all 6 feet and 4 inches of him swaying. He stood right in front of a bald man with a beard, an American flag draped over his shoulders. He smiled like he was in a toothpaste commercial.

“Might you let me and my friends through? We’d like to go to school.” He said, the only one of us that was still breathing.

“God hates fags. You and your friends are all doomed to damn-” The man started off shakily, before Troy barreled his way through, the bald man easily pushed aside. We followed after him, and the crowd, not unlike the Red Sea, parted for us, Troy playing the part of Moses.