Colorblind

I’m left handed. This is not a choice.

Like many lefties, I am actually mixed-dominant, which means that I bat and eat with the left, but fast-pitch and shoot with my right. These are not choices. Although I can train myself to perform adequately with the wrong hand, it requires constant, exhausting effort. Unlike you strong dominants, I have had to stop for a moment before beginning each and every manual task I have ever learned and ask myself “okay, which side does this?”

For a long time, lefties were tormented, forced to write with the wrong hand, even killed by people who saw us as an abomination. I watched my naturally left-handed friends at school trying to write with their right hands hooked into an unnatural position. My mother’s teachers would smack the left hand with a ruler until the child was forced to relent. However well intentioned, this was abusive; in fact, it was torture.

I live in a world in which certain people think that certain other people have chosen a sinful path simply for seeing the world as they see it. They tell themselves that these sinners could walk the righteous path if only they would accept the will of God. I have no dog in this fight, but it occurs to me that when a man says a lifestyle is a choice, he must see it as so. I wouldn’t know about that, for I could no more choose to be gay than I can choose not to perceive the bands of the rainbow. But wherever you fall on the spectrum, ask yourself for a moment, what if the leader of some foreign church declared that you could be gay if only you accepted the loving will of his God into your heart. Imagine if you lived in fear that your tricolor vision would be discovered, and the ignorant color-blind bastards around you, convinced of your demon wickedness, would deny you employment, human dignity, even life? Imagine if you feared having a left handed child, lest he be denied opportunity.

If God made me at all, he made me left handed. If he made you, he made you with your sexual orientation. If this is so, then HOW DARE YOU PRESUME TO PLACE YOUR VIEWS ABOVE THE WORKS OF GOD? How dare anyone rationalize the ignorant notions of iron age men into the justification for prejudice and discrimination in the name of God? We ate from the tree of knowledge and knew shame for our nakedness. Now, as we pick apart the very tree of life, we should understand the shame of ignorance, and that we will never again see the garden unless we build it ourselves, together.