Winter decided to make a better late than never appearance in my neck of the woods thus throwing my Thursday off track. Nothing like a snow day meaning no school for the kiddo when you have a shit ton of work to do with a 3.5 day weekend on the horizon, needless to say writing blog posts wasn’t an agenda item yesterday. However while playing the role of mistress of entertainment yesterday and banging out some work, I did get a chance to do some reading yesterday and stumbled upon this gem.
It seems that the Girl Scouts of the Colorado has allowed transgender children to participate and some are none too pleased about it. One young lady going so far as to make and release a video encouraging us to boycott the annual Girl Scout sales until the Girl Scouts reverse their decision. As you can imagine both sides are heated and passionate about this issue; even in my own personal online circle, tensions are running high on this issue.
Frankly can I just say that any type of bigotry sucks, too often bigotry is rooted in a fixed value system often handed down to us by our parents and others. Of course we have those who use their faith and religious beliefs as a reason to mistreat others. Having spent a fair number of years as an Evangelical Christian, I know in my early years I had a lot of so-called beliefs that I believed in until a number of years ago when I asked myself why I believed those things.
Speaking from a Christian perspective, there is nothing Jesus ever said that tells us to hate anyone…period. In fact Jesus spoke words of love, from a Christian perspective the whole premise for the existence of Jesus even coming to be is that we are all sinners and none of us can meet the gold standards of the 613 Mosaic laws and that Jesus was the one who could. Faith in him and belief that he is the Son of God who died on the cross and rose again and now sits at the right hand of God is the foundation of modern Christianity. Jesus though never told us to do much of anything but to love and be helpful and yes I am summarizing. It was Paul formerly Saul who did much of the church building and rule writing and while he may have been inspired by God, fact is Paul was a human who may or may not have had an agenda.
In these modern times we have a lot of folks who take their truth and use it as a tool to mistreat others. It wasn’t that long ago the bible was a tool used to justify mistreatment of people who looked like me. Now we have folks using it as a tool to tell others who they should or should not marry and of course telling people what is right or wrong. Frankly I am a big believer that if Jesus came down and walked in our midst he’d be none too happy about all the things done in his name.
Back to the Colorado situation, frankly I think we are scared by what we don’t understand and when we don’t understand it and it doesn’t square with our reality we fear it. Until a few years ago, I never knew many trans people but I actually made the acquaintance of a trans woman who did school me and gave me some food for thought. At the end of the day, she is woman just as I am a woman. I recently read Chaz Bono’s book talking about his journey to manhood and it gave me pause. To know who you are but to not be accepted because of another’s “truth” is not something anyone should have to go through. As for the Girl Scouts I applaud them for their stance. Frankly none of us should play the genital police and if a girl wants to join the Girl Scouts I say let her, her path and journey to girlhood is none of my business nor is it yours. As for me, I will buy a few more boxes of thin mints this year and hope my waistline doesn’t expand too much.
I love this post! And I love the Girl Scouts; I worked at one of their summer camps in Massachusetts for several years, and I loved the positive difference it made in the girls’ lives. I loved how accepting they were (and this was in the midst of the whole Boy Scouts awfulness about not allowing gays into the organization), and how supportive they were of families and girls of all types. I think it’s shameful to call a boycott on them for accepting someone. Really? We’re blaming them for being welcoming? Shameful.
Although I struggle with the cookie thing, because they are just. so. unhealthy. But that’s a whole separate issue….Maybe I’ll just make a donation to the organization.