Amazon Trail
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The Amazon Trail Weeding Out |
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by
Lee Lynch
Well, I went out and bought
a Weed Eater last night. I really don't want to play this gardening game.
I can remember Grandma Lynch on her hands and knees yanking crabgrass
out of her lawn interminably. While it's true that she grew the best corn,
strawberries and beefsteak tomatoes in the world, I understand why my
father became an avid apartment-dweller. It's ridiculous to spend significant
parts of one's life pulling weeds.
Which got me thinking about how much
of gay life these days is spent wresting out noxious growths of the anti-gay
sort. Once we were the great unmentionable, now the people who revile
us can't seem to speak of anything else. I fear that the carefully laid
plans of the right will succeed and W. will be reelected in order to squelch
us. There is no way rational people can vote for him, but by raising this
ruckus over our patient requests for equal rights, the populace is being
frightened into making irrational decisions. How awful it must feel to
be told that gay people are destroying marriage and the family, the very
core of many Americans' lives. Some will vote Republican in the belief
that they are defending themselves and everything they hold sacred.
Out, damned weeds! Look at the weeds
sprouting at every reference to gay marriage. At first they were lively
early spring green shoots, a handful of protesters in Portland and San
Francisco. This is to be expected - a sign of the healthy soil of free
speech. Their biblicized signs could be laughed off and we could pity
them for the venom they must live with to produce their hateful words.
Such a smattering of them just after the oppressive winter did not seem
to require sharp weeding hoes and cutters.
But look at how they've spread tough
tangled roots through this democratic soil to block gay civil rights.
Imagine needing a constitutional amendment, much less 50 of them, to defend
heterosexuality against you and me. Yet we have to reckon with these ridiculous
efforts or they will take over the life of the garden, sucking the nourishment
from the soil, casting dank shade over everything we've painstakingly
grown. The belief systems of the non-gays who find us pernicious go deep
and can sometimes tap into scarce water, leaving us strangling from a
thirst to just live our lives. That's how it was in the ballot measure
wars - eventually all our energy went into the fight and drained our lives.
Which, of course, was the intent of the naysayers.
Look at the thorned stems and hairy
leaves that steal space from the gentler, carefully nurtured plants. How
come we scare them so? What was it with that Southern county that just
tried to legislate us out of town? Kentucky is back to considering a measure
to stop gay couples from adopting children - didn't we already win the
battle against that weed? Look how nasty Virginia's getting, with conservatives
trying for a measure (it failed) that would have prevented same-sex couples
from getting subsidized home mortgages.
Look at these perennials, these persistent,
ugly weeds, resistant to freeze and drought and carefully wielded cutting
tools. When a couple wants to marry, to adopt, to buy a house, share health
insurance, inherit from each other or even, it feels like, plant a garden
together, the weeds of ill will spring from the earth again and again.
Do I prepare my garden only for these weeds to thrive? It is as true of
human effort as of gardens that the soil which is good for the flower
is also good for the weed. It seems like gays just start to blossom, when
suddenly anti-gays are everywhere, trying to crowd us out with unconstitutional
laws, suspect polls and violence.
Some of the most troublesome of these
weeds, like bindweed, the stuff that sneaks underground and doubles, triples
itself every time a root is cut, can come up looking pretty. Bindweed
can be mistaken for morning glory. In politics bindweed wears suits and
ties and has the fragrance of flowers in aftershave and perfumes. They
are the most ambitious of the plot. They look for backs to climb on. When
every other minority group is made off limits to them, they stand on us
and shout about the way the pansies have invaded and are overrunning the
garden, when it is the parasitic weeds that survive by attacking us.
Well, heck, no more Mr. Nice Guy. I'm not
kneeling on the gardening kneepad for these weeds, cautiously exposing
their roots and yanking them out one by one. I'm going to set up this
Weed Eater and mow them down. I expect the next election will take care
of the other little nuisances.
Lee Lynch is the author of eleven books including The Swashbuckler and the Morton River Valley Trilogy. She lives on the Oregon Coast, and comes from a New England family.
© Lee Lynch 2004