Sometimes, people can be cruel. The levels of human cruelty can seem unimaginable sometimes. Sometimes, I think people forget that other people, no matter how different they are, are just people too, and people have feelings. Upon trying to find out more about my most recent diagnosis, I came across cruel, stereotypical statements from people who obviously didn’t understand it or desire to understand it. Most of all, they obviously did not consider that it is most often the result of child abuse and neglect. In fact, remembering my own college days as a Psychology minor, I hesitate even telling others about this diagnosis because I remember my professor telling us what miserable people those who have this diagnosis are, and that there’s not a lot of point dealing with them because they’re never going to  change (actually, according to my research, that’s not true).

Guess what? I’m not a robot. I have feelings. I have problems, just like anyone else. Mine might veer into suicidal crises more than some, but that doesn’t make you any more human than me. When you want to make fun of someone because of the way they are or the way you think they are, consider why they might be that way. Then, maybe, consider what caused you to not be that way. Why do you not have this specific mental illness? Why are you not Muslim? The answer is never “because I’m better than x.” The answer is “because y didn’t happen to me,” “because I had z support system,” “because my ancestors were Christian Europeans and this is what my family knows to be normal.”

I am rubber; you are glue. Anything you say about me says more about you than it ever will me.

Maybe I should back up a little bit. Anyone who hasn’t been following this blog for a while or who doesn’t know me especially well in person is probably going to read all of that and say “that’s nice,” and traipse off. Yet, I come with a story, a message. I have several stories, actually, but each end the same and each are interwoven with one another because that’s the way life is.

My name is Molly, and I am a survivor. I stand (well, sit) before you not yet a quarter of a century old having survived severe abuse, incest, a tornado, a fundamentalist church, and any number of other things. I want to say with full confidence that I am finally truly happy, but making such claims worry me. Maybe I’m afraid I’ll jinx myself. My therapist says I have a “strong survivor spirit.” I continue to survive depression and post-traumatic stress disorder that occasionally leads to bouts of suicidality. But everyone has their problems, and they say that which does not kill us makes us stronger. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m Superwoman yet.

Last week, I confronted my abuser and informed him that I remembered everything. I spoke at length about the love of Jesus and our parents and how lucky he should think himself, and how wrong he was to use God as a weapon of hate and war. I finally said things I have been waiting my entire life to say and cried harder than I think I’ve ever cried. At the end of all of this, I ended up filing a report with the police for harassment and now he can never contact me again or I will tell the police to go ahead with the harassment charges. After all of this, I called my Dad and told him everything: that I’m gay, that I was abused, that I called the cops on my brother a few hours earlier. All of the things I’d been so afraid to talk to my Dad about because I was afraid he would disown me or not believe me came out all in the span of a few minutes. Then something amazing happened. Dad told me that I would always be his daughter and that he loved all of his children equally, and that he was going to speak to my brother about what he’d said about gays deserving the death penalty, because no one deserved to die. Somewhere in all of this, this turned into a discussion about God. Dad asked me what I thought Jesus’s message was. I told him “That everyone is equal and everyone is a child of God, but some people don’t understand that, so you have to keep on fighting ’cause it’s what Jesus would do.” It was the first time anyone in my family had ever asked me my opinion about religion instead of telling me what they thought I should believe, and I really want to think of it as the beginning of something wonderful between my Dad and I.

When I was a little girl, I was so afraid for such a long time. I feel like much of my life has been lived in fear or in the shadows of silence. This is where abuse lives, in the darkness, like mold, stinking. Last week, I turned on the light and poured bleach all over that mold and watched it slowly die. My brother lashed out from the accusations, of course–the mold does not want to die. He tried to convince the police that I was delusional and should be locked away, but I had his cruelties in writing–seven pages of emails in which he told me gay people should be put to death and horrible things about myself.

The mold made a stain on the floor. It discolored the tile and I’ll always know it was there for so long, too long. I worry it might’ve weakened the hardwood underneath. But I’ll also know to pay more attention and keep that bleach handy so it can’t come back and get so bad, and to keep an eye out for weak boards. Break the silence. Each time you speak about what happened, it gets a little easier. I was told that if I ever told anyone what happened, no one would believe me and that he would kill me. Yet, I sit here quite alive, and believed. All I ever wanted was to be able to be honest about my life and my past. Now, I have that, and that feels absolutely amazing.

I’ve never had much of a relationship with my Dad. Growing up, when he wasn’t at work, he was emotionally distant. After a lifetime of him never really being there, it seemed normal to me to act as if he wasn’t. It was only after moving halfway across the country that Dad and I actually began talking to each other and getting to know each other as people. What I’ve learned is that my Dad and I share a lot in common, most of all our ponderous nature.

The entire issue that had caused me to call my parents in the first place started when my brother compared gay people to dogs and said that they were not the children of God. I wrote him to tell him that he was wrong and that I didn’t want to hear his hate speech anymore. This conversation eventually culminated with my having to call the police for harassment after being told that, as a lesbian, I deserved capital punishment. What could’ve ended disastrously opened up lines of communication between my Dad and I and caused us to have a more honest relationship. In fact, Dad said he was going to speak with my brother about the things he had said in the name of God because my brother called himself a preacher, but wasn’t even acting Christian.

What is Christian is to respect other people for who they are and to embrace diversity. What is Christian is to fight for equality, no matter how threatening your opponent might seem. Accept other people for who they are. Don’t tell them they deserve to die or that they’re going to hell or deserve any sort harmful thing to rain down upon them. All of us have to live on this planet together, so we’d might as well get along.

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

To learn more, visit Social Justice Christian.

And I think you should too.

Yesterday, I marched on Washington to call for an end to the war, along with about 10,000 other people. This makes my third trip to DC, my first trip being only a month and a half before 9/11 when I was a fifteen years old from Arkansas visiting with 4-H through Citizenship: Washington Focus. Back then, I remember going to the National History Smithsonian and thinking it was absolutely amazing, and being annoyed that the other girls in my group moved through the museum far too quickly for me because they didn’t care about history. Now that I’m older and finishing up my Master’s degree in History, my reaction to the museum was much different. I call this rection “disgust.” There’s so much left out, and so many exhibits created by a certain cable channel reputed for its bad history skills. It’s emphasis is sensationalism to get more viewers, thus, more money, instead of creating factual programs–which is very strange to me because history is sensationalist enough all on its own because people have the tendency to be dramatic, selfish, impulsive jerks (also, cynical). Now that I’m older, the Smithsonian, to me, is like calling a fast food burger nutritious. The Smithsonian, to me, is now just like high school textbooks, full of heroification and one-sided lies.  Nowhere is there the story of how George Washington became General, then President, because then he would just seem like another egotistical, greedy mortal. Instead, inside the Smithsonian and all over DC, there are various statues for Washington, many of which make him look like some Greek god. But he wasn’t a god, not at all. He was just a dude with bad teeth that showed up on purpose in his soldier uniform to make himself look important, even though he’d only had relatively minor roles in the British army as a Lt. Colonel during the French and Indian War, and surely nothing to prepare him to be a General in a war. (For an explanation of Army ranks, click here. Note the great difference between Lt. Colonel and any kind of General.) It’s like a con, really. But they can’t make him seem like you or I. Instead, they call him “noble” and erect giant phalluses to, perhaps, symbolically show the world for what he was compensating. Instead of telling a fuller, more honest story of history, they devote a huge portion of the museum to war, war, war, of course saying nothing of imperialism or deaths or the suffering of fellow human beings in our names. Why not? What do they fear would happen if they told the American story, both good and bad? Perhaps it is like Langston Hughes’s deferred dream. If they told a fuller story of American history, would those who viewed the exhibits and learned of this mourn, then revolt? Yesterday, I watched as Americans that don’t know their own history walked around like the Smithsonian like a shrine, like they’ve found the holy grail of what it means to be American, which is why the line for the entertainment portion–tv and actors and pop culture and stuff, where they keep Dorothy’s shoes and Archie’s chair–stretched all the way to the lobby. Because fiction is more popular than non-fiction.

It was outside the Washington Monument, however, where Cindy Sheehan had set up camp, where she and others had created a GIANT recreation of Arlington Cemetery for those who’d been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, including civilians, that I watched a fat man point and laugh and suggest to his family that they go look at the protest, to look at the fake cemetery, with all the very real dead people from two sides of the world. I think this is when my dream exploded.

As I listened, I found myself thinking differently about the line “’twas grace that taught my heart to fear.” I thought of my childhood. No, it most certainly wasn’t grace of any sort that taught me to fear. It was my brother, with his swinging fists and probing hands, his regular death threats and cruel verbal abuses. Many times, I thought death would be safer than living in the same home as he. I resent fear, for fear is controlling and abusive.

Dictionary.com defines fear as such:

1. a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid.

2. a specific instance of or propensity for such a feeling: an abnormal fear of heights.

3. concern or anxiety; solicitude: a fear for someone’s safety.

4. reverential awe, esp. toward God.

5. that which causes a feeling of being afraid; that of which a person is afraid: Cancer is a common fear.

Why must reverential awe toward God be denoted by the same word that can be defined as anxiety or “distressing emotion?” No. Many times growing up, I heard the phrase “to put the fear of God” in someone. Even as a child, I was confused by this phrasing. Was God some big bad bully that would come down from the heavens to beat us up if we didn’t behave correctly? Why should we worship and revere a person like that?

This was the God I grew up with. We weren’t close. Sure, I attended Sunday school every week and sat through thousands of boring hellfire-and-brimstone sermons before fighting it out with my family where to go for supper. We kept in regular contact like some stalker that doesn’t understand restraining orders. As a teenager, I tested God’s limits. No matter how many times I dared him, he didn’t strike me down dead. Looking back, I realize I didn’t understand God at all, really. I knew the corrupted version of God that I was taught, the one that sent all women to hell and wouldn’t listen to their prayers; the one that commanded that men could beat their wives and children to keep them in line. I knew a God that had allowed me to be hurt so many times in his name, until I didn’t want to hear his name anymore, and until I was a young adult and much more serious about leaving this world for the nothingness I imagined.

Yet, it wasn’t the only version of God I knew. As a young child, my mother had told me about another God, a different God entirely, who had the same name and was a key character in the same book. Her God loved the children red, yellow, black, and white. Her God hadn’t sent my younger-older brother to hell, at all, the way Daddy’s God had. She said Jesus was taking care of him for us. His tombstone spoke of a garden up in the sky, and God needed a beautiful flower, so he plucked my brother from Earth. I watched my mother carefully tend to grass around his tombstone like fixing her child’s messy hair. I watched more and more framed cross-stitched patterns adorning the walls all over our house because Mom wanted something to do with her hands. God has plans for everyone, she said. God took my brother because it was his time, so we shouldn’t be sad, she’d say, usually while crying.

“And Grace my fears relieved.” I firmly believe that Jesus walks with me, and this is how I’ve managed to survive this long. Whether it’s God or whether it’s all I’ve been through in my life, I don’t scare easily. I protest because it’s what Jesus would do. If I’m going to live in a world with so many injustices, then I’d might as well try to make a difference while I’m here. Back in Jesus’s time, lepers were considered unclean and had to live separately from others. Jesus didn’t care. In Matthew 10, he sent his disciples to scatter the countryside and “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give.” Jesus was not afraid, so I should not be afraid.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
‘Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far
and Grace will lead me home.

To me, equal rights for all is political. Everyone is legally equal, or should be. As a historian, one can look back to view the progression of equality–votes for women, etc. As a political activist, I’m also keenly aware that not everyone is equal. Racism and economic hardships plague our country. I feel like, no matter how much I would like all to be equal in every sense of the word, there are others who wish to bring people down for their own benefits.

No one should have to go hungry. No one should have to live on the streets. No one in what we call the freest, most democratic country in the world, should have to go without health care or without efficient health care coverage. And, most of all, no one should have to go to other countries and kill others in the name of imperialism. And when I am president, we will all hold hands and sing Kumbayaa around the campfire, which will be simulated as a courtesy to asthmatics. The end.

Describe a particular organization, person, or moment in history that helped to mobilize a meaningful change in equal rights for all.

Seriously? You want me to choose one? You’re killing me, here. All right, then. I’m not sure why, but when I first read this, I immediately thought of Helen Keller. Helen Keller is billed as a disability hero, but she should really be recognized in schools as a Socialist or reform hero. And it’s not fair. We’re all taught about the “miracle” of a deaf and blind child learning how to communicate with the outside world in public school, but we’re not taught what Helen Keller went on to do with her abilities.

Helen Keller’s disability story is taught to children with the meaning that anything is possible if they try hard enough, but Keller herself recognized how lucky she was thanks to her wealthy parents. She famously said that “the power to rise is not within the reach of everyone.” This is why she became an advocate of the disenfranchised. Keller spent most of her life trying to make a positive change in the world around her. She partnered with the NAACP to fight against racism. She supported the IWW and labor unions, saying that “I became an IWW member because I found out that the Socialist Party was too slow. It is sinking into the political bog. The true task is to unite and organise all workers on an economic basis. It is the workers themselves who must secure freedom for themselves.”

“I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness.”

Of course, this editorial’s problem was not with openly gay people in the military, but gays in general. Calling DADT a “ban” on gays in the military, the editorialist asked “wouldn’t it be simple[r] just to disband our military and invite our enemies to come on in?” This fails to comprehend that gays are already in the military, and always have been. In fact, soldiers in some of the most vital positions as Arabic translators in the latest wars have been dishonorably discharged when it came out that they were gay. Without enough translators, how can a military sufficiently interact with people half-way around the world?

Oh, I know. Call them all “enemies” and shoot civilians to kill? After all, that mentality had no lasting effects on the psyches of Vietnam veterans. If you don’t know what the dark-skinned man in front of you is saying, how are you to know if he is asking if you know the time or if he is verbally flipping you the bird?

A January 27, 2010 Washington Post article estimated that there are at least 66,000 gays serving in the United States military, or about 2% of all military personnel. An October 2009 Huffington Post article stated that almost 13,000 gay men and women have been discharged, including more than 400 in 2009 alone.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell hurts everyone. It creates a sense of shame within gay military and prevents young people from pursuing military careers in which they may have otherwise excelled. Worse, it feeds those who would hate by justifying their homophobic beliefs as the majority view or as even acceptable. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is discrimination, and it is shameful. If it were discrimination by any other name, it would not be allowed. No one should be forced to ride on the back of the bus, or the Humvee.

Gay soldiers, and soldiers merely suspected of being gay, are being killed in Afghanistan and in San Diego. Where is the legal protection for diversity within the military? An estimated 66,000 gays and lesbians are currently serving in the American military. How many more must be murdered by their fellow servicemen and –women before change happens and murder and discrimination are no longer accepted by those we call so brave to fight in our names?