A truce has been called between religious folks and gays.  Or at least that's what we're being told.  The Fairness for All Act, legislation intended to give rights to both Christian conservatives and transgenders, has been put before the House.  For the latter, it proposes that "sexual orientation" be added to the Civil Rights Act, making it hard to discriminate against anyone on the basis of sexual identity.  It gives sweeping protections in housing, business, banking, and "public accommodations."  On the other hand, it grants protections to anyone in a business with fewer than 15 employees and grants exemptions to anyone in a "faith-based" organization.  The Deseret News says it resulted from a dialogue between LGBT groups and representatives from the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Mormons, the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, and other such suit-and-tie respectables. 

But those of us who've escaped the wasteland-in-training known as Seattle know that the LGBT community is just that — a community.  Not a uniform band of orthodox goose-steppers, but a volatile cocktail of competing doctrinaires — a hodgepodge of neatniks and weirdos, kind people and jackasses, bullies and victims.  The whole gamut of men, both rotten and trustworthy.  I've spent time with lots of these people, both as a coke-head and a straight-laced Christian, and I can attest that the majority are decent people.  Many of them sexually looser than us, to be sure, but otherwise decent.

But alongside this decent majority stand the activist jackasses.  These are the people to whom peaceful coexistence isn't enough — who need you to agree with everything they do, and to do it smiling, even to support them while they do it.  If there's a dress code at work, they show up wearing drag to annoy you — and threaten to sue if anyone complains.  They march in parades wearing bondage gear in front of children.  If you praise a man for being manly, you'll end up in H.R.  If your three-year-old son wears a dress one day, they push you to cut off his gonads.  They push for Elsa to be a lesbian and for Bert and Ernie to be gay lovers.  They came up with a new pronoun yesterday, and if you don't use it perfectly today, they'll sue you.  They consider Drag Queen Story Hour the height of civilization and berate anyone who won't have sex with a transgender (a thing known, to even the radical feminists, as rape culture).

We heard that these people wanted equality, but what they really want is to rule us.  No other group in American history has ever had such privilege, or carte blanche in general.  Four years after the Supreme Court ruled to redefine marriage, we have grown men showering in the little girls' locker rooms; bakers going bankrupt for politely following their convictions; children in Canada being taken away when their parents won't make them look like the opposite sex; and the willful transmission of AIDS, a 100% life-wrecker, being lowered to a misdemeanor in California.  We were told, when marriage was redefined, that its opponents were religious fanatics and slippery-slopers.  Yet here we are, and the bottom of the slope is getting closer.  We, the people who are taxed at the point of a gun barrel, are already paying for our own rapists to get surgery to look like girls in prison.

Idaho is a great state for many reasons, but primarily, in my opinion, because we don't have all these problems — at least not yet.  The Fairness for All Act, on the federal level, and the Add the Words Bill, on the local, are both attempts to ruin this paradise.  They're giving us the same old snake oil sales pitch.  They say upstanding people and gay radicals can live in peace together.  That this is the final deal, and not just one more step to a worse one.  That the First Amendment can protect you — unless you work for a successful business.  That the main people it protects are the decent majority of gays — and not the toxic, backward sodomite minority.  It will do exactly the opposite.  The gays who were living peacefully will continue to live peacefully.  The people who blatantly and purposely offend the most basic tenets of good taste, good will, and natural rights will become feared — and get rich pillaging the best of us. 

Beside this obvious con job, the Fairness for All Act is a misnomer.  It gives rights to only some, and it gives them in the worst way possible.  It claims to protect both gays and the religious.  But what does this imply?  That only religious people deserve sanctuary from the Gay Mafia; that no good reason, founded in common sense and natural right, exists to oppose Sodom and Gomorrah; and that any wack-job in a cult has more rights than a well reasoned man with his own personal objection.  In short, it suggests that there can be no reasonable objection.  You say "Xemu commands it," and you're protected.  You say "nature says it," or "studies say it," or "statistics say it," or, most importantly, "experience says it," and the successful business you built for yourself is flushed down the drain — simply because you gave a reason, and not a loophole.  But no people who rest their freedoms on "I have a religious exemption" deserve freedom.  Either your religion is demonstrably right on practical matters, or you and your God are both frauds.

My last objection to the Fairness for All Act, at least here, is a logical one.  This act, as The Washington Post notes, was introduced not by the Gay Mafia, but by Rep. Chris Stewart, another Republican invertebrate from Utah.  His ostensible aim was that "all of God's children, regardless of sexual orientation or religion, deserve dignity, respect, and the right to pursue happiness.  This legislation allows us to settle the legal questions and get back to the business of loving our neighbors."  This is what he says to drag queens who'd take your children away and pump them full of hormone-blockers.  I wonder what he'd say to the adherents of Moloch, or Ba'al — also technically "God's children," to wit, alongside rapists, murderers, child-molesters, kidnappers, cartel kingpins, robbers, Nazis, terrorists, and jaywalkers.  Don't they deserve dignity and respect?  The right to pursue happiness?

I have an alternate theory.  Maybe law exists to protect a certain kind of person — and if you cater to the wrong kind of person, or pretend to cater to all people, you lose your liberty, your family, your property, and possibly your life.  And if you think you can live in peace with everyone, maybe you deserve it.

Jeremy Egerer is the author of the troublesome essays on Letters to Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter and Facebook.