Unholy words. Unholy acts.

I don’t want your prayers. Not to the god you worship in churches, synagogues or mosques. Not to the god of murder, genocide, war, cruelty and rage we read of in the torah, bible, koran. Keep those prayers out of it, because that god, as stated so specifically in the core documents of these faiths, hates me and my kind.

In the hours since the deadliest mass shooting to-date in American history, many are trying to parse out the shooter Omar Mateen’s involvement with ISIS and/or fundamentalist Islamic ideology, and while this certainly changes the tenor of the conversation, foundational points about religious attitudes toward LGBT people are being ignored. Many in the Muslim community, including religious leaders like this absolute gem, have denounced the shooting and offered support for those affected by the slaughter, and while that’s grand, here’s what I really want:

Go back to your mosques. Pick up your Koran. Tear out the pages that speak against same sex relations as worthy of death.

And then priests and rabbis, go do the same thing.

Liberal clerics speedily point out how their religion is one of love and peace and all the things that sound good on a bumper sticker, but their chapter and verse stays unaltered, pristine, locked in an ancient world prison that keeps all of us, today, behind the bars of barbarism.

We can’t inculcate people into a philosophical system whereby the ultimate power in the universe expresses its infallible word through a set of written laws and then act appalled when people carry out those very clear instructions to the letter. We can’t pretend that following a god with a history of decimating towns, peoples and nations doesn’t incite adherents to battle. We can’t pretend that our nation “under God” – where Congress members talk about that same god on the floor of our governing bodies, or a lieutenant governor posts weekly messages with religious themes, or a judge known for his statue of the decalogue reviles same-sex marriage – isn’t overrun by the cancerous ideology of the book religions. We can’t pretend those credos haven’t infected the ethical systems of our citizenry.

I came of age in a time when thousands were dying from AIDS after a government, a medical system and an entire society turned away from the epidemic, because if the gays got wiped out, it was good riddance. I was a freshman in college when Matthew Shepard was tied to a fence in Wyoming and left to die, and were he alive today, we’d be the same age. I’ve poured over documents about gays tortured and wiped out in the Holocaust. I’ve researched the church’s campaign of demonization and murder against gender-variant and queer people since its inception. I wrote papers in college on hate-crimes against LGBT people and how they’re examples of overkill where madmen don’t just kill the person, they use multiple weapons and commit further atrocities on the corpse because the hatred against us is so high. Since I came out at 15, for the last 24 years, I have combed through the record of imprisonment, rape, mutilation, systematic slaughter and degradation suffered by the LGBTQ people of the world, and while I can’t lay the blame so simply at the feet of men and women with their eyes turned to heaven, I can say, without a doubt in my heart, that were it not for the oppressive predations of Judeo-Christian-Islamic beliefs, 50 more gays and lesbians would be alive today.

The Scourge is initiating a campaign among his readers. Take a picture of yourself holding the torn-out pages of the bible/torah/koran/scriptures that denigrate the LGBT experience. Post it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

#unholywords