I spent most of yesterday at the Kentucky Capitol where our GOP supermajority overrode Governor Beshear’s veto to pass one of the cruelest, most hateful and unnecessary anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-humanity laws in the country. Here’s a (no paywall) link if you’d like to know more:
I attended both the protest on the lawn outside, where we were all both mortified about the law and happy to see and hug our heroes and allies (sharing some of those photos here). Then I went inside the rotunda for The Family Foundation’s gathering to support Senate Bill 150 becoming law. It was, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, like going from the light into the darkest darkness.
Inside the somber rotunda, a Lawrenceburg woman whom I don’t know and have never met walked up to introduce herself. She reached out to shake my hand. I shook it. It took me a second, but I soon recognized her name as a person who used to write hateful things about me and others on social media. Bullies like her are the reason I finally just shut my Facebook page down.
The woman smiled and said something like, ‘I just wanted to tell you I go to Ninevah church where we love everybody and you. I love you.’ I don’t know what I said, except that my words were few and it solidified my experience with these folks and the very twisted view of “love” and Christianity they seem to have.
As Kurt Vonnegut might say, “And so it goes …”
Not 18 hours earlier, however, another Lawrenceburg woman had walked up to me in a parking lot and said she’d waited 3 yrs to tell me she was sorry our newspaper editor (at the time) and others had bullied me into stopping my Anderson News column. I was so stunned by the pure kindness of this, I cried all the way home. As Henry James said, ‘Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.’
There is so much work to do.
Teri Carter's Library 