Remember Vicky Hartzler, the former Repug congresscritter who whined and howled in the legislature about the evil “agenda” of LGBT+ people who just want to live, love, and be left in peace? Well, she’s out of office at the moment, but she’s still the gift that just keeps on giving, at least when it comes to making her gay nephew’s life miserable. And apparently his parents are on board with her hateful agenda, too. Andrew Hartzler, who’s currently not speaking with them for reasons you can readily guess, shared some video recently of a preacher they hired while he was at college to “exorcise” him of the “demons” they imagined to be behind his orientation, and hooWHEE, is it a sight to behold:
Yes, that’s right. The hateful preacher even went into Andrew’s closet, where nothing lives except his very normal wardrobe. And made brimstone noises about the devil being in there. IN THE CLOSET.
You can’t get more ironically truthful than that, for if Andrew had remained in the closet with his sexuality, he sure enough would have been beset by demons. Not the kind that make you gay — they don’t exist. No, I’m talking about society’s demons, the ones called Conformity and Fundamentalism. And they bring other demons in their wake: Deception, Addiction, and Mental Illness, to name just a few. Society has a shitload of demons, and every time an LGBT+ person comes proudly out of their closet, they begin to exorcise themselves of those demons without even uttering a word of religious incantation.
As for what made Andrew gay, well…if you believe that God makes people, and that God doesn’t make mistakes, or junk, or what have you, then you just have to assume that God made Andrew as he is. And if God does everything for a reason, as fundies so often love to say, then God made Andrew gay for a reason, too.
Now, what that reason might be, I do not know. But I can guess. It’s to teach the likes of his aunt, his parents, and that silly preacher a good lesson, is my humble guess. A lesson in what Christian love and tolerance actually mean, or should.
The question is, will they ever learn it?
