Editor,

Today, I read a letter to the editor which was surprisingly interesting, or more accurately it pointed to an interesting phenomenon, shared by some humans.

I’ll summarize the letter, without much detail because I feel the author’s points are banal, repugnant, and false. 

In short, the author suggests that if the public schools recognize pride month, maintain written materials which reference LGBTQ+ humans, or discourage harassment and violence aimed at LGBTQ+ humans, then the school is somehow infringing on the author’s personal religious freedom.

There are numerous people who have dismantled such claims, and I’m going to leave those topics to others.

What caught my attention in Ms. Fox’s letter is her seeming laser-like focus on what LGBTQ+ people do in private. It really seems like Ms. Fox, and many who express sympathy to her points, are hyper focused on the physiology of how gay humans engage in sexual activity. 

I could be mistaken, but I have a difficult time believing that Ms. Fox is concerned with LGBTQ+ people cooking dinner, or going to a restaurant, or seeing live music, or reading the news, or hiking in the mountains. 

Rather when Ms. Fox threatens to sue the schools if her child is exposed to “said deviant lifestyles and said agenda.” It seems like she is worried that conscious awareness of the existence of LGBTQ+ people will somehow cause her children to imagine and focus on what LGBTQ+ people do in private. I will concede that I do not generally want to imagine what people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms, whether they are hetero-cis, or LGBTQ+. I address that by not engaging my imagination that way. In short, I mind my own business.

As to Ms. Fox’s reference to “said agenda,” the only agenda I am aware of is the insistence that LGBTQ+ people be allowed to live their lives as they see fit without harassment or violence being directed at them by others. To me, that seems like a perfectly reasonable agenda, it is something that I completely support.

The fact is that none of the activities which LGBTQ+ human beings engage in during most of their lives, is in any way noteworthy. Really, they do the exact same boring things as hetero-cis people do, like Ms. Fox. They go grocery shopping or clothes shopping, they go to work and pay their bills, they vote on election day or they don’t, they make bank deposits and withdrawals, they join friends for picnics, etc.

…the complete list will be entirely too boring for me to write and even more boring for you to read, but I think you get the idea.

The one thing that really seems to upset some people, like Ms. Fox, is how LGBTQ+ people act in the privacy of their own personal bedrooms. I could totally get that Ms. Fox only engages in hetero-cis private activities, but why worry, so much, about what others do?

This really does seem odd to me. I truly can not understand why so many people obsess over private activities between consenting adults. I have wondered about this particular quirky obsession for a number of years, but I’ve struggled with how to articulate it, until today. 

It really does seem to me that a simple solution to Ms. Fox’s frenzied agitation would be for her to literally mind her own business, but for some reason, she can’t or won’t do that, with regards to LGBTQ+ people’s private activities.

You might wonder what leads me to this conclusion.

In short, I have not seen Ms. Fox, or anyone, for that matter, write even one letter of protest about school materials that include a man talking about his wife, or a wife talking about her husband, or a marriage between a man and a woman. 

I just don’t think references to hetero-cis romance or relationships cause Ms. Fox to be agitated or to become perturbed by unwelcome thoughts of what a man and a woman do in the privacy of their own home, and whether it is “deviant” or not.

I just wish, for everyone’s sake, that Ms. Fox could find peace, when she hears that two men or two women are married, or that someone is trans. It would be so much easier for her if she didn’t engage in personal disgust with some series of thoughts about what she thinks they do in private. I honestly wish for her own sake and happiness, that Ms. Fox could mind her own business in those circumstances. 

It is a fact that people come in various forms, with diversity in color, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc. I honestly wonder if there is some sort of help available to Ms. Fox, and people like her, who really struggle with maintaining internal peace, knowing that LGBTQ+ people now refuse to keep hiding, which they have done for decades, well actually for centuries. I wonder if Ms. Fox and people with her particular challenges can get the needed support to be happy and unagitated even while LGBTQ+ people insist on enjoying the same rights, in society, as hetero-cis people. I do hope so.

Michael Adams
Los Alamos