I share this pain. My cats will sit at the sliding glass door and yell, 10 feet away from the 5 year old entrance built especially for them. The same one they use anytime I am not within eyesight. The same one they fly through when the lawn man shows up. That one.

16/16. I cannot undo Kirk’s words. I cannot undo his death. But I can resist the contagion of hate that is overtaking all sides. I can choose, again and again, grace. Even when it costs me. Especially when it costs me. You can, too. Only love will make us great again. Not hate.

15/16. It takes little more than a brief review of world history and present geopolitics to understand that truth is on full display.

14/16. The physicist Steven Weinberg once said: “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil, that takes religion.”

13/16. And most disturbingly, we hear religious leaders, charged with preaching love, turn pulpits into loudspeakers of hatred, disguising cruelty as virtue and division as faith. That, above all, chills me.

12/16. And so we scroll through feeds dripping with terror and outrage.
We watch conspiracy merchants grow rich by feeding us lies. We see extremism packaged and sold in the same marketplace as entertainment.

11/16. Immigrants, fleeing wars, disasters, and poverty in search of the same opportunities this nation once proudly promised, are cast as invaders, criminals, and parasites. The great betrayal is not theirs, but ours, when we reject them.

10/16. And who gets painted as the enemy? The poor are scorned as lazy and undeserving, rather than seen as people crushed by systems that reward the wealthy and punish the struggling. Minorities are demonized as drains on society, when in truth they are the lifeblood of its culture and progress.

9/16. Fear is the currency they trade in, because once people learn to fear, it is only a small step further to teach them to hate.

8/16. What kind of country are we shaping, where hatred has become our common language? We are drowning in it, whipped daily into frenzy by pundits and politicians who profit in money and power from the chaos.

7/16. To them, our existence is evil. Our relationship not worthy of recognition and undeserving of the full rights afforded by our marriage.
But I will not accept their definitions. I will not take up their hatred and wear it as my own. They can choose hate. I refuse.

6/16. In MAGA world, the righteous does not include me. To their movement, I am the threat. A gay, childless Democrat. Married to a woman who is gentle and good, and yet painted as wicked in their eyes, simply for loving me.

5/16. They twisted tragedy into an engine for their own power, pouring poison into the wound before the body was even cold. They framed themselves as saviors in a war of good versus evil, protectors of the righteous besieged by unseen hordes.

4/16. In the hours after his murder, GOP leaders, our president among them, rushed to point fingers. They cast blame on leftists, on trans people, on Democrats, on Antifa, on anyone who fits into the pantheon of enemies they rely upon.