Rainbows Are Conservative Christians' Symbol Of Abusing People And Getting Away With It

Meanwhile LGBTQ+ people use rainbows to symbolize diversity and inclusivity and love and joy. EW! PERVERTS!

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Oh no, the gays stole the Christians’ rainbow again! Photo by Margaux Bellott on Unsplash

It’s summertime and conservative religious lunatics are bitching about people getting gay rainbows all over their sports. Just this week, FIFA had to inform Egypt and Iran that they cannot march into Seattle and ban rainbow flags from the World Cup match happening there. Ya know, sorry. (Not that the dirtbag head of FIFA exactly did it with open arms to the LGBTQ+ community or anything.)

Before that, conservative religious lunatics of the ‘Murican Christian variety who happen to pitch for the San Francisco Giants felt the need to scrawl Bible verses all over the Pride Night hats they were not actually required to wear, because being nice to LGBTQ+ people offended or oppressed their little snowflake asses, I guess.

Specifically, they wrote Genesis 9:12-16 on their hats. Which says (NIV):

¹² And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: ¹³ I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. ¹⁴ Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, ¹⁵ I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. ¹⁶ Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”

Get it? It’s the Noah’s Ark Bible passage about rainbows. Because they believe the dirty homosexuals and transgenders stole the rainbow from good, God-fearing Christians, who invented rainbows, and who can always be identified by the rainbows they wear around their necks. (The Catholic version features Jesus riding the rainbow.)

Now, Donald Trump’s Department of Weaponization, Retaliation and Christian Fascism (DOJ) is opening an investigation into Major League Baseball, for feeding those poor pitchers to lions by saying defacing uniforms by chicken-scratching bullshit all over your hat is against league policy.

Anyway, there is this whole rigamarole with conservative Christians trying to “reclaim” the rainbow from LGBTQ+ people. They have always cherished it, they claim, they put it on their hats at baseball games, their favorite hymns are called “The Old Rugged Rainbow” and “When I Survey The Wondrous Rainbow” and probably the jingle from the Skittles commercials.

But yeah, no. That’s the cross (or the crucifix, for the Catholics). En realidad, the rainbow has never been a particularly important symbol in Christianity, or at least not top five, and these fascist motherfuckers only pretend it is when they’re clearing their throats to remind everyone that God Hates Fags.

But, y’all, can we discuss something real quick? Thanks.

I am not anti-religion, and anyone who’s been following this project/newsletter should have figured that out by now. Personally I am not sure where I fall on the religious spectrum, but I definitely came from the land of the evangelicals and I speak their language, and I think there’s lots of room for lots of people to experience spirituality in their own way, should they choose to do so, with whatever framework/architecture makes sense for them.

But I am going to introduce a concept here that, even for very liberal believers, might seem a little uncomfy.

And that concept is that the story of Noah’s Ark is not a beautiful Bible story, nor does it have valuable lessons for us beyond what now seems glaringly obvious to me, which is in part that the God of Abraham seen throughout the scriptures of three major religions is not only not all-knowing or perfect, sometimes He’s outright wrong, and usually is a complete dick about that.

I’ll let y’all back away real quick so the lightning is sure to hit only me.

My point in bringing this up is that I think it’s revelatory the way this story is taught as beautiful and bouncy and fun, how children in Sunday School do pageants re-enacting it, how there’s an entire fuckin’ Creation Museum in Kentucky focused on proving that according to science, Noah and his family DID TOO repopulate the earth all by themselves, plus two giraffes and two dachshunds and two ducks and and we don’t know who the fuck else got to go on the boat, but it was two of each kind, all of this is LITERALLY true.

I think it really says something that Christian fascist scumbags are mad at LGBTQ+ people for “stealing” their rainbow, because another one of the prime lessons of the Noah’s Ark story, if you actually read it, is that Daddy is allowed to fly off the handle and start beating, abusing and murdering everybody, but as long as Daddy says sorry and pinky swears he’ll never do it again, then you have to forgive Daddy and keep obeying him, because Daddy is boss.

What does that sound like? Not only does it sound like every patriarchal domestic abuser/spouse-beater/kid-molester who ever lived, but it starts to make more sense why so many conservative Christian men are patriarchal domestic abusers/spouse-beaters/kid-molesters, and how that behavior has been modeled for them by every father figure throughout their entire lives, all the way up to and including The Big One.

Oh yeah, for the loser men scrawling these Bible verses on their hats because they hate gays, this story is a story of why their God is awesome.

Let’s hit that scripture again:

¹² And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: ¹³ I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. ¹⁴ Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, ¹⁵ I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. ¹⁶ Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”

Note that it says whenever God sees a rainbow, God will remember that time He pinky-swore never to destroy all of humanity ever again, at least not with water, wink wink, nudge nudge, loopholes are fun!

This isn’t a reassurance to the scant few survivors of God’s wrath. It’s God’s reminder to himself to put a lid on it whenever He feels like He’s about to kick over the Lego castle He just built because He’s mad at it.

And let’s be clear, this is after this little tantrum in Genesis 6, which put all these events into motion:

⁵ The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. ⁶ The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. ⁷ So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” ⁸ But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

OK, drama queen.

The Lord regretted. So the Lord decided to MURDER EVERYONE BY HOLDING THEIR HEADS UNDER WATER AND ALSO THEIR PUPPIES.

Except for this one guy Noah. He’s cool.

BUT EVERYBODY ELSE.

There are Law & Order: SVU episodes and tons of true crime podcasts about people who behave like this. I am just saying.

Also, question: would an omnipotent, omniscient, perfect God not have the ability to see His little experiment with humans going wrong, or anticipate that six chapters into the whole Bible He would have a hissy fit and decide to kill everyone?

Was that part of the plan?

Now look. I make jokes.

But scripture gets fascinating if you’re willing to really read it as it is, and not what you want it to be. And a careful reading of Abrahamic scripture reveals a lot of things, and one of them — if you’re being honest, and if you’re willing to grapple with uncomfortable ideas that bring up questions you were raised not to ask — is that the God presented there is always saying He’s perfect and all-knowing and all-powerful, but when the receipts are examined? Not so much!

Look at the book of Job. (Which I was required to read as summer reading in AP English in my Christian high school, because they’re confident that fully indoctrinated Christian kids will never read something like that and come away like “What is WRONG with this creep?”)

Look at the fact that the big climax of Christian tradition is that God had to change everything up yet again by sending His only son to die on the cross for Him, which somehow reconciled Him to the humanity He created but couldn’t bear to look at because they were so totally depraved and in need of a savior, which is weird, because wouldn’t a perfect God by definition create perfect creations? But anyway, He had already destroyed them once, but that didn’t fix it, but He had promised he never would destroy them again with water, asterisk! And He was totally planning on destroying most of them again later on with fire (Revelation) but in the meantime, HERE’S JESUS!

Those gnostic texts where Yaldaboath (God) is claiming to be the one and only perfect God and Sophia (Wisdom) responds like Gurl that is not true, and you know it, they make more and more sense after you take a fresh look at passages like these.

So many of the Bible’s so-called mysteries start to fall away if one starts to accept the notion that perhaps the God of the Bible — whether He is literally real, or if He is not, and is rather a reflection of the cultures that created Him — is actually not a flawless figure, nor blameless, nor all-knowing or the epitome of wisdom.

But those are questions white supremacist Christian nationalist conservatives don’t have the mental capacity to grapple with, much less the courage. There is much in the Bible that its simplest idiot devotees are simply unwilling to look at any more closely than the dipshit songs they learned in Sunday School.

And again, their love for stories like this one says a lot about them that isn’t all that surprising when you think about it. What more conservative Christian message is there today than that God is allowed to have an abusive temper tantrum, murder everybody you’ve ever met, and then be like “BEHOLD FOR I SHALL NOW GIFT YOU WITH A COVENANT OF MY ENDURING LOVE”? (With His fingers crossed behind His back, of course.)

It’s also part of their revenge fantasies, by the way. Remember the thing about Disney Princess Theology, how white conservative Christians are fundamentally incapable of correctly finding themselves reflected in stories and scripture, always seeing themselves as the heroes or victims of every narrative, never the villain, which is weird since in real life they’re the villain of every story in which they are a character?

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Samuel Alito: Most Tiresome Disney Princess Ever?

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You know those scumbags imagine themselves as Noah or Noah’s wife, and they imagine their pets as the animals Noah brought on the ark. It would never occur to them that actually God might have decided to massacre the everloving shit out of them and their beloved puppies that day, had they been alive, or that a modern-day Noah’s Ark might be a ginormous Pride float.

Which is strange, because the story of Sodom is right there near the Noah’s Ark story in the same book of the Bible, the story that stupid MAGA bigots falsely teach is about gay people, even though the Bible explains clearly that the sin of Sodom was about overfed, arrogant, uncaring MAGA types who reject strangers. “[A]rrogant, overfed, and complacent; they did not help the poor and needy,” it reads in Ezekiel. (A theme that actually runs throughout scripture!)

“Therefore I removed them,” God added.

(With FIRE, not WATER. Not flooding, can’t get mad! Not flooding, can’t get mad!)

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Godless Sodomites In Memphis! (It Ain't Who You Think)

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Even though Matthew 7:21-23 is clearly a letter to people like them, the one where Jesus says ²¹ “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. ²² Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ ²³ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’” {NKJV}

Yeah, scripture sure is interesting when you read it with eyes and ears open.

But not for human butt itches trying to “reclaim” the rainbow from LGBTQ+ people. That rainbow taught them how to abuse people and never have to face accountability for it.

And now here come all these LGBTQ+ people perverting that message by making the rainbow about diversity, inclusivity, love, joy and hope and other woke shit like that.

What sickos.

Here’s a song about maybe God isn’t perfect. Oh boy, when this song came out when I was 14, I thought I was touching a hot stove connected to the very fires of hell to even listen to it. Now I know better.

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