Why The Candace Cameron Bures Are Worse Than the Lauren Boeberts
Both venomous; both dangerous. Only one can be more sinister.
It is impossible to ever fully understand what influences and experiences begat the Colorado Springs shooter who killed five and injured at least 19 more patrons at Club Q. But, it stands to reason that the person was inspired and encouraged by people who grant permission to attack LGBTQIA+ folks, including politicians.
As AOC pointed out to Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, you don’t get to be the Grand Marshall of the hate parade and then act regretful about its consequences.
I know Lauren Boebert. Maybe not personally, but anyone who grows up in a small, red, anti-gay environment knows her, too. She is a proud bigot who operates out of perceived righteousness. If you don’t fit in, she’ll figuratively take a shit on your front porch and post a picture of herself doing it, like so many proud fish pics on straight-guy Tinder. Boebert knows that it will piss you off, hurt your feelings and alienate you from neighbors, and that’s what she relishes. The thrown gauntlet is the point.
I also know the likes of Candace Cameron Bure, who recently made headlines (a semi-regular occurrence) for once again extolling “traditional” marriage. As a queer feminist with two queer siblings — each of us chewed up and spit out by evangelicals — her brand can be even more insidious.
Outwardly, she proclaims love. In fact, she won’t shut the fuck up about all the people she loves and how. The difference between her and Lauren Boebert? Bure is the type to tell you how much she you loves you while taking a shit on your front porch, then chiding you for being divisive when you tell her to stop.
That kind of aspartame-flavored sweetness is simply a better marketed cultural carcinogen. Her approach is manipulative, cowardly and passive-aggressive. It can also create the same lasting damage as those who explicitly call for attacks and expulsion of LGBTQIA+ people.
Keep in mind, her comments about the LGBTQ+ community are in-line with the laughable idea of “love the sinner; hate the sin.” For evangelical Christians, love is not an unconditional state of support in this thing called life. Love is a devotion to a theoretical framework and its rules.
This means that true love can mean disowning your child if he or she is gay, or putting them through radically traumatizing therapies. It can be denying their feelings or asking them to live a life of abstinence. It can mean voting against loved ones’ right to marry, keep a job, or say the name of their spouse in the classroom. Love can be as cruel, dehumanizing and hardline as you want it to be. (You can even use it as an excuse to create a shitty TV network!) As long as you call it love and you have some carefully selected Bible verses, that’s what it is, right?
This approach provides protection to those like Bure who want so badly to believe — and for us to, as well — that they aren’t “a bad guy.” As long as they aren’t being violently, outwardly homophobic, they can carry on with the self-deceiving idea that they are not like the other non-feeling haters out there who contribute to the isolation, disproportionate substance use disorders and often violent deaths of queer people.
And a monster who thinks of itself as a kind, loving being is really good at converting. The Boeberts of the world may inspire and replicate extremists, but the Bures make otherwise kind people feel positively angelic about embracing their inner homophobe.
