The Rainbow Treatment

 

Recently I gave the rainbow treatment to my Facebook profile picture. I had earlier read about it and seen some people do it but had left it at that. You see, I’m not that big on symbolism. While I dearly hope the LGBT community succeeds in their endeavour to get accepted around the world as regular human beings, I didn’t feel my face in rainbow was going to make any difference whatsoever to that effort.

Then one day, a Facebook friend posted a message on his timeline asking his friends not to promote gay marriage with this rainbow thingy. The usual reasons – god, devil, Leviticus, etc. I’m not that Facebook-savvy, in the sense that I started using it only a few months ago, though I had an account for long. I don’t have many fb friends either. I accepted requests from people I knew. This person also was one such acquaintance, but he turned out to be god overload. His posts are mostly about god. Perhaps he thinks god is actively trolling the Internet to see who is posting what or who is surfing the smut channels. Anyway, my friend doesn’t realize that I’m not big on god. Sometimes when I see a whole bunch of god-related messages such as “share if you believe blah, blah,” I go “avantammoommede…” To be sure, I don’t mean anyone’s ammoomma, but use it as a general cuss word in the privacy of my home.

Why are these religious people going ape-shit over this issue? Wouldn’t the all-forgiving, compassionate, loving, merciful being forgive these LGBT people (by burning them in hell, forever, ha ha), that is, if what they’re doing is a crime/sin? At any rate, they, the LGBT people, are not going around imposing anything on others. They’re just asking for equal treatment as human beings. And the religious people want to deny that. They want to impose their beliefs, based on some medieval stories, on others.

The Jesus & Mo cartoon of July 1, 2015 expressed it the best, where Jesus says, “It goes against our fundamental right as believers to tell other people what they can and cannot do”.

And that is what got my goat when I saw his message. So, I decided to convert my iruttinte aatmavu (soul of darkness) profile pic to a rainbow aatmavu. Not just in support of the LGBT movement’s victory in the US, but to support freedom in general. Freedom to be yourself, freedom to not conform, freedom to think, speak and write. Freedom from bigotry, freedom from racist, religious and parochial nationalistic brainwashing, freedom from bullshit. I can dream, can’t I?