Evangelical Christians are distraught, reports the New York Times, with the choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton for president. The Times’ in-depth profile of a conservative Christian community in Iowa is quite the read for someone like me—a Left Coast queer rights activist who grew up in a Midwestern Republican household and took a brief turn as a Bible thumper myself. Their tortured journey toward Trump is so incomprehensible to me on so many levels, it felt worthy of dissecting. Let's start with Betty and Dick Odgaard, evangelical heroes of sorts for refusing to rent out their chapel space—a family business—to two gay men for a wedding. They eventually lost so many customers once their prohibition came to light that they had to sell the chapel.
Overnight, it seemed, they discovered that even in small-town Iowa they were outnumbered, isolated and unpopular. Everyone they knew seemed to have a gay relative or friend. Mr. Odgaard’s daughter from his first marriage disavowed her father’s actions on Facebook, and his gay second cousin will not speak to him. Even their own Mennonite congregation put out a statement saying that while their denomination opposes gay marriage, “not every congregation” or Mennonite does. Mrs. Odgaard, 64, the daughter of a Mennonite minister, was devastated.
“It all flipped, so fast,” said Mr. Odgaard, a patrician 70-year-old who favors khakis and boat shoes. “Suddenly, we were in the minority. That was kind of a scary feeling. It makes you wonder where the Christians went.”
They felt like a minority and it was "scary"—bingo! Welcome to the world of LGBTQ Americans, along with numerous other minorities in this country who have the shared experience of feeling vulnerable.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2d6tkjN
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