Translation for DUMMIES

People ask me why, since I myself am married to a man, why would I work so hard to make gay marriage a reality? I answer that today, no one questions the white students who went to Mississippi to march with Martin Luther King. That will set them straight, as it were, pretty fast. Still, I don’t understand why that isn’t obvious. It feels like a dumb question to me.

Another dumb question I got yesterday on a radio talk show, was why I go for such easy targets like the Bush administration. Is it that I am too scared to take on a real enemy like Islam? I just answered, Islam is not my enemy. I am not oppressed by Islam. Of course, oppression exists in the fundamentalist movements there, but Christian fundamentalists here are the ones who get me down.

Why these people want to start fights with me, I will never know. Is it because of my race, that they are so desperately racist, that whenever they see someone who is not Bill Bennett talking about what is wrong with this country, it makes them go crazy?

I imagine it is the combination of my gender and my connection to the queer community as well as my Asian features that makes some conservatives want to blow up with straight white male entitlement and rage. Since my purpose is not to explain my race, as often Asian characters on tv shows or in movies are there to do, most don’t know what to make of me.

I wish someone would explain straight white male entitlement to me. Why do I, with as much right to be here as anyone, have to constantly translate their confusion and double-speak? Why must I constantly try to accommodate their racist, sexist, homophobic views, just because they are trying to understand me?