Tools of GodA Story by Annette Jay Sweeney"God wrote the bible..." so does that make homosexuality wrong?You grew up in one of those strong, Christian families. The kind where your religion is the only one that is right and everyone else needs to accept Jesus into their heart before you can go to heaven. You constantly tried to convert people, telling them that you believed Armageddon was coming. It was normal for you, because you went to a Christian prep school. To you, God was in everything. God used people as tools to fix people who had went astray from him. You were one of these tools, and honored to be one. It was a beautiful life feeling purposeful. You enjoyed telling people they were wrong and pointing out scripture, because your parents told you God wrote the Bible. You wanted what God wanted, and that meant changing people. Your cousin, he was different. He grew up three states away in a household where they didn’t believe you had to go to church. They were spiritual. To them, being on terms with God one on one and dealing with the world with guidance on an emotional level was most important. They went about their lives just trying to get by, to experience, and to grow. They didn’t believe in telling others what to do. They didn’t think we were all tools. They simply went about their life talking about art, sex, beauty, poetry, amongst other flighty ideas. Yet as you two grew up, despite your differences, you were close. You played well together, you enjoyed many of the same things, and you had many of the same ambitions. When he would visit once a year he would stay for a month. You would spend that entire month outside, in public swimming pools, skating down Main Street, going to Pirates of the Caribbean four times while he was there, terrorizing malls, and going to baseball games with mitts far too large for your hands in the hopes that you would catch a foul ball. Your parents dropped hints at your cousin that religion was important. You all took him to church once. He said he just didn’t like it. You didn’t understand why. How could someone not like church? How could someone not like God? When you began to move into the teenage years the differences really started popping up. You called anyone who had an abortion a murderer, and your cousin said it was none of your business. You looked at a drunken hobo on the street and hissed sinner, while your cousin practically wept for the sadness they saw in this man’s eyes. You saw a woman kiss a woman on the ferris wheel and gagged in disgust while your cousin turned away, saying simply love is love. You suspected nothing until you went to college. Your cousin had always had girl trouble, but you never figured out exactly what the problem was there. It was only once you were stuck in classrooms with the homosexuals you saw the similarities. Most gay men seemed to dress the same. They typically wore brand name clothes like Aeropostale, were very well groomed, and seemed to always have a fohawk. This wasn’t true for all of them, but it seemed pretty prevalent. Your cousin had always dressed well, used hair gel, etc. What alarmed you was that in the last picture you received from him, he had a fohawk. That was what really pushed you into thinking. “Could he be gay?” Even then you denied it. You said that they were just like him, not vice versa. He was just a good looking guy whose parents raised him to be well groomed. Plenty of guys just liked that style. When he came to visit next you treated him like you always did. You did notice that the places you took him he didn’t look at women, but maybe he had a girlfriend? You had not asked. Then one night while you had dinner with you family, you found a rainbow bracelet on his wrist. When you drove him back to your grandmother’s where he was staying you parked and got serious with him. You asked. “What is this?” You pointed at his wrist. The bracelet was like a smudge of feces across him in your eyes. His eyes flicked down and showed surprise. It was obvious he didn’t realize he had this on before now. Clumsily he covered his wrist, sliding the bracelet off with the ease of a sanitizing wipe on a baby’s bottom. “It’s just something a friend gave me. I saw this movie Milk and wanted to fight for gay rights.” “Are you gay?!” The pitch of your voice reached past the ceiling of the car. “Does it really matter?” “Of course it does! Do you realize you will go to hell?” At this point he stared at you. In his eyes you imagined a flash of red, the sign of the devil, of something that had taken hold of him. He reached a hand towards you that you dodged. He paused, a pained expression crossing his face before he turned and left the car. Your anger and emotion heightened and you peeled out, speeding away as you cast imaginary rocks in his face. You cut contact. You refused to tell your family why, because frankly you didn’t believe it could be true. He didn’t say it was true. Maybe he just had a friend that was gay and was therefore touchy on the subject? Someone so much like you could not like someone of their same sex. It just wasn’t possible. He was so logical, so spiritual, so right. You put your shame, fear, and confusion into anger. That anger built into hate. No matter how many times he tried to call you, you ignored him. After a few months he slowed his calling down to a trickle. After a couple of years he gave up entirely. When he came to visit you went somewhere else. You told your parents you hated him and had reason. Something made them accept it. Maybe they sensed some kind of difference in him themselves. You grew older. You graduated. You got a good job, got married, had children. Everything was going just right. One day you caught the flu due to asthma you had carried since childhood that your mother said was the result of her sin of smoking. You sat in the waiting room at urgent care. It was going to be a long wait. Normally you brought a good novel to read to make up the time, but you had forgotten in your rush. Luckily, a national news station was on the television in the room. At first there was a story about a missing little girl. This was always a painful one for you, especially since you had your own children. You prayed that she was safe. You didn’t even like to think what could have happened to the child. The next story was introduced. “In Logan, Utah a hate crime against 26 year old man resulted in his brutal death. In this case the defendants claim they were doing the will of God. Full story next.” You immediately thought that another terrorist believing in Allah had gone nuts and murdered some innocent person. As the commercials went by you felt your anger building, until the intro music broke in again. Then you paid rapt attention. “26 year old Seth Mortenson beaten to death after leaving a night club.” Shock ran through you. That was your cousin! “He had spent the previous hours at Ashley’s gay bar. When he exited the club a group of local Christian radicals attacked him in the alley. A video recorded by a bystander as he called the police revealed the attack. They seemed to have used bars and two by fours, also carving messages into his arms. He was declared dead at the scene.” While they went into opinions on the story, where people would call in and discuss the situation, you sit there stunned. These men were claiming they did the right thing in the name of God because this man, his cousin Seth, was adamantly open in the local community. For the first real time in your life, you were completely torn. You could understand why someone would hate a gay person (It was disgusting!) but killing them? At first you tried not to think about your cousin, one of the nicest people you ever knew, being beaten to death. Then you felt yourself falling down a rabbit hole you never imagined you could. You were angry. No, you were fuming. You stood, staring at the screen as the faces of the defendants were shown. You couldn’t understand why you hated them so. You cousin asked for it! Yet, he was just a normal person. What did it matter what he did in private? © 2010 Annette Jay SweeneyAuthor's Note
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Added on May 6, 2010Last Updated on May 6, 2010 AuthorAnnette Jay SweeneyIDAboutReading and writing have always provided a loving escape for me, but both are now taking on a more serious level. I thrive on reading others' work and helping them to improve, while also depicting my .. more..Writing
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