Minds that need to be washed out with soap

A regular commenter at Pandagon and here at the Blend, John Goff of One Big JackGoff, has a personal and pretty raw post up with some of the racist, sexist and homophobic statements his father has uttered over the years.

Some of these are pretty awful, so I thank him for letting me repost them to a wider audience. He said in his email: "father was from Kansas, as you know, a nexus of bigotted ideology."

What I noted to him is that the bright side is that he's breaking the cycle by not perpetuating this hateful BS. Not everyone breaks away from the bigotry drilled into you in your formative years; look at his dad's fellow Kansans, the Phelps Klan, who represent generations of hate-spewing. It doesn't have to be that way. From John's post, The Father Files: Chapter the First (I grouped the batsh*ttery by category), and you know we've all heard variations on these before:

On women and their place in the world:

"My mother loved my father. She wouldn't eat oatmeal, even though she liked it, because my father loved wheat mush. She made wheat mush every morning, just the way Dad liked it. That's what a real woman does. She cares about what her man likes and acts accordingly."

On race:

"Black people have always done the exact same thing. They wait for the white man to come and tell them what to do. And when he does, they call him a racist and a bigot and wonder why the white man doesn't help them out economically."

"Black people are responsible for the drug epidemic. They're the one's that sell it all the time, after all. Go to any major city and what do you see? Black people. And where are the drug problems? The big cities. Isn't hard to draw that conclusion."

"Black people are angry about slavery, even though there hasn't been slavery for over 150 years. Thet're fommenting revolution, nothing more!"

On gays (John had an uncle who died of AIDS-related pneumonia):

"There's an infection that causes homosexuality. It exists as a hedonistic love for something God has condemned. You'd be no better than dirt if you turn out like Howard (my uncle). You saw how he died. That was just God punishing him on Earth. Just think what how he's being punished in hell."

"Gay people are making us all gay."

"Gay people are the reason God will bring about the end of the world. The more Gay people there are, the closer we come to the Apocalypse."

And here are double-dippers of ignorance...

"A gay person acts like a monkey, having sex with what ever it sees. Black people are the same way. They don't care about love, they sell their own women for crack. Cocaine is all they care about. That's why they're poor. And gay people want to destroy our society be transforming it into a gay culture, one where we all desecrate God's plan for us."

"You're a fucking sissy! Women are supposed to do the housework. It's their natural province. If you let your girlfriend be slothful, you're no better than some lesbian and her sissy faggot partner!" [WTF?!?!]

It has to break your heart to have so little in common with relatives when it comes to tolerance and world view. Not only that, it's hard, not to mention, unpalatable, to even try to address comments like those above at a family gathering where you are clearly outnumbered when it comes to challenging bigotry. Lots of times the uncle/father/granny/aunt is used to being tolerated, even affirmed, in their spectacularly ignorant rants. All you can do is to choose to live your life differently and not pass that thinking on.

Feel free to contribute some of the gems you may have witnessed that made you want to run screaming from the room. Think of it as way to wash your brain clean of the hate and ignorance.