Dusty Farr is fighting for his transgender daughter’s right to use the girls’ bathroom at her Missouri high school.
Before his transgender daughter was suspended after using the girls’ bathroom at her Missouri high school. Before the bullying and the suicide attempts. Before she dropped out.
Before all that, Dusty Farr was — in his own words — “a full-on bigot.” By which he meant that he was eager to steer clear of anyone LGBTQ+.
Now, though, after everything, he says he wouldn’t much care if his 16-year-old daughter — and he proudly calls her that — told him she was an alien. Because she is alive.
“When it was my child, it just flipped a switch,” says Farr, who is suing the Platte County School District on Kansas City’s outskirts. “And it was like a wake-up.”
Farr has found himself in an unlikely role: fighting bathroom bans that have proliferated at the state and local level in recent years. But Farr is not so unusual, says his attorney, Gillian Ruddy Wilcox of the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri.
No he didn’t. He admitted he was interpreting “God’s word” wrong his entire life. What happens when his interpretation changes again?
Edgy
I’d love to hear a different way to interpret the man’s own words if you have one.
It’s not about that. The man is religious, that’s not gonna change from one day to the next. You don’t need to be religious to be a bigot, that was just his excuse.
What happened to being tolerant of others beliefs? Religion has nothing to do with being an ignorant bigot, it’s just often used as an excuse for it.
You are misreading why I’m focused on that. I agree with your viewpoint, except that he believed his bigoted beliefs were God’s will. He also believes his release from them were God’s will, and that he’d wrongly interpreted God’s will before.
Had he made the jump to “God is bullshit” instead of “I have misunderstood God” then I’d have a lot more trust in his change of heart. However, in this circumstance he has very clearly decided that his morals go no further than whatever God “wants” him to believe - and therefore, should he wake up tomorrow and realize God actually wanted him to be like he was before, I have no reason to imagine he’ll be anything different than that.
I agree that there are problems with that kind of religious thinking but what I got hung up on in your original reply was this
What says that the next interpretation will be negative? We can’t assume that. I know where you’re coming from and I was a bit bitchy in my reply, I’m sorry about that.
Who knows why he said those things the way he said it, but if that’s what it takes for him to accept the things that are going on around him then it’s just whatever, good for him. Who knows, maybe his next realization will be that the bible and religion aren’t “all that”.
The way I interpreted your post at first was almost like accusing someone of “futurecrime”. We don’t know what is in store for this person, all we know is that he had a change of heart about something but obviously he is not ready to let go of his religious beliefs. I guess it also made me a bit angry because it sounded like something I might’ve said a long time ago when I used to be fiercely anti-religion and I really don’t that old version of me. It wasn’t very productive.
Maybe that was a bit of projection on my part.
I wouldn’t dream of taking religion away from someone today. I don’t like it but for some people it’s all that they know and it’s how they make sense of the world. It’s a crutch but some people need it and are completely lost without it.
Oh no, I’m not anti-religion at all. Although I did have a period like that in my past, also.
Truly devout/pious folks from any religion I’ve known have been good people and a joy to be around. I think they’d be good people anyway though, and their religion just gave them a framework.
When folks use religion as their justification for behaving in ways that are clearly at odds with its most basic tenets, that’s what I find toxic, and do feel is far, far too common.
I’m probably coming in hot on the topic in general because although I’m a cishet white guy I’ve just about had it with the ridiculous bullshit from the right in this area in recent years, and it’s becoming a real hotbutton issue to me.