WHY INDIANA WANTS ME! (Lord, I Can't Go Back There)

I know it’s not becoming to brag, but Indiana wants me!   You may wonder what makes me so special and I’ll tell it “straight” up—I am a heterosexual in a heterosexual relationship!  YAY ME!!!  In fact, a very dear friend of mine once called me “pathologically heterosexual”, which means I am SO straight, it’s like an illness.  Yeah, I don’t think he meant it as a compliment either.  Bygones.  Another thing Indiana covets about the great and wonderful me is that I am a Christian!!!  At least in the sense that I go to a church that practices the teachings of Christ like “Love thy neighbor as thyself”.  We do NOT practice the teachings of Christ where he says “Go into business to provide a service for money but then deny that service to paying customers because you believe I might disapprove of them”.  I think that must be a read-between-the-lines lesson, because I can’t find it in any bible I’ve ever seen.  I know that Jesus never addressed homosexuality according to any of his biographers, so if he had a problem with it, we’ll never know.   We do know that Jesus hung out with a lot of people who would be considered “immoral” even by today’s standards, but he never made any of them pizza, so there might be a solid argument to be had there.  However, he did actually say, “Judge not lest ye be judged” and that seems pretty clear, at least to me.

In spite of my totally awesome heterosexuality, I do not feel very Christian when I hear stories about people using Christ as an excuse to exclude others.  The Westboro Baptists make me most especially peevish, and not just because they called my alma mater “an ivy league whorehouse with a gay agenda”.    I also feel judgmental about the people who donated money to that pizza parlor for refusing to cater gay weddings; but on the other hand, a fool and his money can be good friends to have under any circumstances.  My brother and I want to take advantage of the situation (hey, everybody is doing it!) by setting up a GoFundMe! account to support us in our total bigotry towards bigots!  Or our alternative plan is host a big gay pizza party wedding in Indiana so that we can meet Zach Braff and Donald Faison (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/06/zach-braff-gay-pizza_n_7010510.html)!  WE LOVE SCRUBS!!!  My favorite headline so far is the woman who wanted to explain why she WOULD serve an adulterer but would not serve a gay couple.  I didn’t need to read the actual article to know that what she didn't say is “Because adultery is a chosen behavior and I support freedom of choice!”  Ha.

This reminds me of the time I (didn’t) refuse to serve an adulterer but still got to speak my piece:  I had a retail job in my 20’s where I was commissioned to sell very high end chocolate.  Like, $40 a pound chocolate.  25 years ago.  DO THE MATH.  Anyhow, I was working the hectic days leading up to Valentine’s when a well-dressed man requested TWO boxes of chocolate, one for his wife and one for his mistress.  Without a flicker of change to my expression, I explained to him that a half pound box was $20, a full pound box was $40 but he could put together his own assortment for the same price.  He shrugged and said, “So give me a half pound box for my wife and a full pound for the mistress.”  My response:  “NO.  Buy 2 half pounds or 2 full pounds, I don’t care; but I won’t sell you 2 different sized boxes.”  At this point my boss, who was an excellent candidate for a coronary under the best of circumstances, started making his way over to intervene.  But when the man said, “Okay…I’ll take two full pound boxes”, my boss suddenly disappeared.  That is called upselling for a cause, my friends!

It is good to have a cause; it is helpful to have a strong belief system and moral compass to guide you through the ups and downs of this thing called life.  However, discrimination by any other name is just as uncool—or as my #onetruelove Stephen King put it, “You can frost a dog turd, but it’s still a dog turd.”  The people who claim they are acting on behalf of an invisible deity in the sky might as well be saying “The devil made me do it” because it is an abdication of personal responsibility, pure and simple.  Whatever your deeply held personal belief about homosexuality may be, at the end of the day they are still your neighbors.  And Jesus is 100% clear on how we should treat our neighbors—we love them as ourselves.  And I don’t know about you, but I LOVE pizza!  This means I wish pizza for everybody, no exclusions.  If you, like me, are a bad Christian who judges people for withholding the services they went into business to provide for the public from people they deem unworthy, go to this website:  http://www.gofundme.com/pizza4equality  You can put your money where your judgmental mouth is and donate to help LGBT homeless youth.  I feel certain Indiana is chock full of judgmental, bad Christians just like you and I.  And fingers crossed at least some of them are planning that big, gay pizza party wedding because I am all about Zach Braff and Donald Faison throwing up pies!