Not my point. You absolutely can point to homophobic passages of the Bible. You can also point to passages of the Bible that are not talking about homosexuality in specific, but that are commonly interpreted as such. My point is that expecting even Christians to agree with other Christians about what texta constitute the Bible let alone what those specific texts actually say is an exercise in futility.

This is the why of the existence of all the various sects and denominations of Christianity. There are theologians who have done lots of academic work to show how the Bible does not need to be homophobic. There are others who have worked just as hard to justify doing grievous harm to homosexuals. Trying to explain both of those with the One True Reading of the Bible is committing the same error they do.

For my queer ass, if Christians all spontaneously decided to follow the theology of Rev. Fred Rodgers tomorrow, I’m gonna breathe a sigh of relief and leave them alone to be just the nicest people and hope they stay that way.

Expecting Christians to follow a given text to the letter will always be setting yourself up for failure. Not only do people pick and choose the doctrine they follow (or more often have it picked and chosen for them by their spiritual leader), different traditions have different emphasis and even different texts they’re operating off of. Expecting an legalistic following of a specific interpretation will leave you expecting far different behavior that most of your observations will show.

Sorry, but it’s actually pretty hard to dismiss the Romans passage, but it is something that can be chalked up to Paul being sex negative, going so far as to exhort people to be chaste or get married if they can’t control their passion if, as he noted, they were not free from such passion as he claimed to be. The other passages commonly cited don’t reference homosexuality nearly as directly, but it would not be a difficult argument to make that the word choices were specifically defaming homosexuality (especially given how common it is for people to use the same sort of defamation). Which isn’t to say that every denomination adheres to the same interpretation of these passages, but they aren’t on as theologically shaky ground as we might hope.

The Heritage Foundation is wild, and one of the most significant public policy groups with deep ties to American conservatism. Basically, any crazy policy that the Republican party has taken on as a major party plank in the past 50 years has a distressing high chance of having its roots in Heritage’s recommendations.

For example, in 1981:

Among the 2,000 Heritage policy recommendations, approximately 60% of them were implemented or initiated by the end of Reagan’s first year in office.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation

Yeah, given how much Trump and Republicans lean on Heritage, and Trump has been talking about doing some “light” tyranny on day 1, it’s ridiculous to attempt to write off the Heritage Foundations’ plan to Christian Fascism.

Now tell us how many Heritage Foundations recommendations do the Republicans and Trump take on board! Distancing the Heritage Foundations from them rather undersells the position of one of the most influential public policy organizations particularly within conservative politics.

Sounds like a reason for Biden to set a whole bunch of legal precedent while he’s still president.

Ah, yes, the “laziness and entitlement” of risking becoming a political prisoner for checks notes not wanting to participate in a plausible genocide. Clearly, political prisoners and genocides have nothing to do with Israel.

Somehow, I get the impression that you aren’t about to argue that what has happened to the Palestinians is sad and that they should be fighting against the people who did it to them.

The prices for fixed costs have gone up, too. People need a place to live, the health to keep living, and ways of ensuring access to both, and the costs of all of those have gone up as well. A not insignificant chuck of people don’t have discretionary spending to cut (not to mention how stressful living paycheck-to-paycheck on the bare essentials can be). Yes, it is certainly worth reevaluating budgets and determining where expenses can be lowered, but those margins have been getting thinner for a long while.

Vote in primaries, vote in off-year elections, vote in local races. We can’t hinge our entire political strategy on who wins the biggest race every four years while ignoring the rest of the political system if we want any chance of having options besides what the two large parties present us.

First-Past-the-Post voting makes this shit suck so hard. Not only does voting third party reduce the threshold for the rest of the field and in particular the party I definitely don’t want in power, that party is most incentivised to prop up my third party candidate. They get to count my vote as win, and with the stakes as high as they are even losing an election cycle means people I care about get seriously hurt.