I wish I didn’t have anxiety. I wish the things I was anxious about were imagined instead of real. I wish the fears were all “in my head”. I think it would be easier to deal with that way. The truth, however, is way more scary right now. I feel like the United States is becoming a dystopian nightmare moving toward totalitarian government.
Ever since Donald Trump entered politics, there has been a cancer growing in our society. There is a lot of hate out there. I’ve been alive for 46 years and I’ve never seen anything like this before. All my life, white supremacists were fringe people; they were the crazies and kooks. Now they’re mainstream again. The “Donald” made it okay to openly show hate as he spread as he refused to denounce it and then spread conspiracy theories that caught on like wildfire.
He and his Republican cronies loaded up the Supreme Court with ultra conservative justices. They flat out denied Obama the ability to replace a justice more than a year before the election. They talked about how the next president should be the one to fill the vacancy. Fast forward four years and we have another vacancy after the election is over. The Republicans rushed through a nomination and confirmation in just a couple of weeks to ensure the new president didn’t get to fill the vacancy.
Now, those chickens are coming home to roost. Someone at the court leaked a draft decision that will overturn Roe vs. Wade. Conservative states are enacting “trigger” laws to ensure abortion is illegal just as soon as the opinion is published. We’re all living in fear that LGBT rights, especially marriage equality, will be next. Mississippi has already passed another “trigger” law to just not recognize any same-sex marriages should Obergefell be reversed, too. I’m about to marry my best friend in the world, Phillip. We’re going into this knowing full well that our marriage could be dissolved by the government for no real reason other than spite.
We’ll have our marriage license and know it was filed with the court, but that won’t matter if things get worse. Sure, there are things we can do such as getting durable powers of attorney for each other, but that’s what a marriage license is supposed to do. Why is all this happening? Religious people who want to force their beliefs on society.
I grew up in a Christian home. We went to church, and I had planned on becoming a minister when I was in college. I studied the Bible academically and took my Christianity to heart. I understood the greatest commandment was to love one another as we love ourselves. I understood what it meant to “be like Jesus” – help the poor, feed the hungry, care for the sick. Basically, you give of yourself when you can for the better of society. You treat people with kindness and love. That’s not what Christianity has become today.
Today, they want to outlaw abortion care because it “kills babies”. They want to outlaw same sex marriage because gay people are “abominations”. Somehow, my relationship with my husband is harmful to people I don’t even know and have never met. It’s so distressing knowing that two people love each other that they’ll do whatever they have to in order to undo it. We used to have the freedom to choose your own religion. Now we have to wait with bated breath to find out which of our freedoms will be the next to go.
Many days, I feel like my heart is going to leap out of my chest. I worry about whether my marriage will be suddenly dissolved. I worry about being harassed or assaulted in public just for being with my husband. I worry about going into a local business and being turned away because of the pride tattoo on my arm. I worry about one day being rounded up and put in prison for who I love.
A few years go, this whole scenario would have been though impossible because “we have laws to protect it.” Now we find out that those laws can be invalidated just because religious people say so. I feel like it’s only a matter of time before the American Taliban comes to power and then we’ll all be screwed.
