“The Great Covide” Endures … and one is struck by the oddly biblical turn it has taken. While most of America is dutifully masking up, there remains that quadrant in the Southeast where resistance to wearing masks and avoiding public gatherings runs high, and many people are in denial about Covid-19, having followed Trump down the road to hellish infection rates. That this region coincides roughly with the “Bible Belt” means that it includes the nation’s highest concentration of people who find a deeper meaning in Plagues, usually involving God’s wrath. Thus, for example, a desperate Pat Robertson tried to explain the pandemic as God’s punishment for gay marriage—really? again?—but the truth is that millions of people have made a conscious choice not to heed the guidelines of scientists on how to avoid spreading the virus, or at least how to protect oneself. A piece in The Times linked resistance to mask-wearing to a macho culture in the South that links their use to weakness or femininity. It is indeed amazing how often the word “faggot” came up on anti-masking protest signs and stickers. So here are few cases from the files.
“MIKE PENCE spoke to 2,100 people jammed into an anti-lgbtq megachurch in a Covid hotspot,” read an LGBTQ-Nation.com headline, which pretty much said it all. The June 28th event was held at the First Baptist Dallas megachurch to celebrate “Freedom Sunday.” Masks were not required, and soon enough Covid rates were spiking in Dallas. The head pastor is the stridently anti-gay Robert Jeffress, who believes that same-sex wedding cakes are a sign of the Antichrist and that all “non-Christians”—which includes Catholics and Mormons—will soon perish in a rapturous “holocaust.” Finally, keep in mind that the Vice President of the United States spoke at this event. The fact that he’s also the head of the national Covid-19 Task Force seems almost beside the point.
THEN THERE’S the strongman president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, a big fan of Trump who has also downplayed the severity of Covid-19 and ridiculed measures to contain it—with similarly catastrophic results: Brazil’s infection and death totals are second only to those of the U.S. While Trump is himself a germaphobe (ironically), Bolsanaro is not, so he kept up the public events, unmasked—until he contracted the virus himself. Before falling ill, he announced that “I trust hydroxychloroquine”—big mistake! (He did eventually recover.) He had also stated that “wearing masks is a faggot thing.” It seems fair to riposte that not wearing them, and adopting policies that are killing your own people, is a fascist thing.
IN THE EVERYDAY PEOPLE category is a transphobic veteran named Richard Rose who survived tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan but died three days after being diagnosed with Covid-19. Rose became something of a social media star for his right-wing antics—jokes about rape, ridicule of Black Lives Matter, support for God and Trump, and derision of all precautions related to Covid-19. So, one day he was tweeting “There are only two genders” and the next (or soon thereafter) he was battling the virus, without success.
Technology to the Rescue! First there was the “water rainbow” in Warsaw, Poland, which thwarted arsonists who kept burning the gay flag in a city square. Then we reported on the “Hate Shield” in Atlanta that blocked the chants of a homophobic group at the annual Pride parade. Now activists have used a drone to plant a giant rainbow flag on the “Motherland” statue in Kiev, Ukraine’s answer to the Statue of Liberty. It was a small victory in a country that doesn’t allow LGBT demonstrations, Pride parades, or even displays of the gay flag (though homosexuality is technically legal), which is what made the drone stunt so remarkable. While the Patriarch of the Ukraine Orthodox Church was blaming the Covid pandemic on gay people, the drone rental company, Dronarium, defended the gay organization: “We are against the manifestation of aggression against the LGBT community, which we consider to be from the Middle Ages.” And so it is.
Caveat Renter Why is it always the Christian youth pastors? Some of the ways in which they’ve gone astray have been documented here, but no youth was harmed in this story. Instead, the pastor in question, one Christopher Keys of Macon, Georgia, was arrested on a charge of “solicitation of sodomy” for attempting to hire a male prostitute. It was a bad night all around for Pastor Keys, who’d checked into a hotel room and hired a hustler on-line, or so he thought, but when he answered the door, in jumped a masked gunman who forced Keys onto the bed and stole his wallet, phone, and keys. The now carless victim later lied to friends that he’d been carjacked and kidnapped by two black men, which is how he ended up in a hotel room without his car. The story started to spread, a TV station investigated, and soon enough Keys was being arrested on the solicitation charge. And if that seems a little harsh considering all he’d been through, recall that he tried to cover up his would-be homosexual tryst with a tired appeal to racism.
