Naw, I Ain't Moving From My Red State And Neither Should You

I get sick of hearing from rainbow community people living along I-5, I-95, inside I-495 (the Capitol Beltway) or an interstate traversing a blue state the tired mantra that we red state rainbow community peeps need to move to the blue ones and abandon the red ones we live in.

That mantra increases in volume in the wake of an anti-gay referendum loss or some odious anti-TBLG law sponsored by the homobigots that overwhelmingly passed.

Didn't see any rush to leave California when Prop 8 passed in 2008 or New York transpeople hitting the interstates after GENDA failed to pass the New York Senate for the fourth consecutive session and may be going on five in a row..

Umm no.  I'm a fourth generation Texan and have been there done that.  As I said in this post last year and I'm reiterating in this one for your reading pleasure about being a TBLG person living in a red state: 

Unless your life is in imminent danger, you fight with every fiber of your being to make it a more progressive place to live.   If you can't flip it totally blue, at least work to make it purple and get the blue part later.   

I noted those comments coming fast and furiously in the wake of the devastating loss that North Carolina activists suffered in fighting their valiant battle against Amendment One.  I felt their pain as I recalled what happened to the Kentucky rainbow community in 2004 when we went through the same drama when I lived there.  For those of us who lived in Louisville our pain was short lived because we had to immediately go back and fight another human rights battle.  

The faith-based homobigots flush with the afterglow of victory tried to go after our Fairness Ordinance mere weeks after the demoralizing defeat we suffered in our anti-gay marriage amendment battle.

You know what they say about a wounded animal being the most dangerous one.  We regrouped and crushed the Forces of Faith Based Intolerance in that civil rights skirmish by getting an 18-6 Louisville Metro council vote to reauthorize the Fairness Ordinance.

It get better North Carolina peeps. The Kentucky TBLG activists regrouped to the point that a statewide Fairness Law has been steadily gaining sponsors and other cities in the state are considering passing local fairness laws similar to the ones in Louisville, Lexington and Covington.

But it's still not cool that you LBGT blue staters, who achieved many of your rainbow legislative goals already in more politically friendly times are smugly sitting on your behinds, are throwing shade at us peeps in red states and saying we need to move to what you consider a blue oasis.

Hey, there are times you peeps in blue areas catch just as much hell as we red staters do   I've had times in which I've had derogatory racist and transphobic comments aimed at me in blue states.  Conversely while living in my red state I've been fortunate to run into people who not only get it in terms of our issues, but are busting their behinds harder than you blue state peeps who are supposed to be our rainbow family to help us achieve TBLG human rights rights progress in our red states.   

Yes we have to fight tooth and nail to get whatever scraps of rainbow human rights progress we do achieve and fight even harder to defend it.  But we do it because the red states are home to us. 

Why?  It's a red state thang, you wouldn't understand.   We love them more than the average conservafool and have just as much right to live there as the smug faith based information challenged idiots who hate on us and are trying to force us out..  Because we rainbow peeps are part of the diverse mosaic of human life we have the incentive and drive to make our red states the types of places we deserve to live in

Because we red staters have the faith-based enemy in our face 24./7/365 and 366 days in a leap year, we don't have time for the internecine semantics wars that always seem to break out at regular intervals on the Net predominately driven by people who live along I-5 and I-95.  We have more important crap to deal with like Tea Klux Klan dominated state legislatures trying to use every trick in the book to erase our human rights.

But the bottom line is our red state rainbow communities are better for it because we have learned by necessity how to spell a word some of y'all haven't yet. intersectionality.   We red state activists have to work together not only inside the TBLG community but also with our non-GLBT counterparts in keeping the conservafools at bay on a wide range of issues that affect the liberal -progressive coalition.

And one of the things you blue staters don't realize is that while our states may appear rabidly red to you and especially the rural areas of them, some of our red states are actually purple and the cities are our turf..  

May I gleefully remind you blue state peeps that the largest city run by an openly gay mayor just happens to be my 2 million person hometown of Houston, the largest city in Texas.

Annise Parker is a perfect example of a red state rainbow kid making a difference.  If they live in a rural area of a red state and don't want to leave, they can move to an urban area in said red state, get an education, find a rainbow hood if they wish and still live in their native red state.

If we are going to eventually expand our issues across the nation, we are going to have to do the education work in red states to make that happen as well and that can't be done from New York or San Francisco.   You are going to need natives of the red states in question talking to their peeps and tailoring the message and tactics for local conditions.

Yeah, this was a tough week for the peeps in North Carolina.  But as a famous Southerner who was a Nobel Peace Prize winner once said, "We must accept finite disappointment, but must never lose infinite hope."  

And yes, from time to time we win those battles against the faith based phobes.  It keeps hope alive and it's sweet when we do. 

We are on the correct side of the moral arc of the universe and will win more battles than we lose.  But in order to turn those red states to purple and then blue, we'll have to have the people who love social justice, rainbow human rights and the state live there to and be tough minded enough do so.