In the midst of Pride Month, the last few weeks have seen an alarming surge of Christian fascist activity.  At the top of superstructural institutions in “blue” Los Angeles has been controversy over a Pride Night at Dodger Stadium.  This is the annual baseball game where LGBTQ fans come waving rainbow flags and where the Dodgers give out “Community Hero Awards.” This year, one of the honorees was the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—a community service group whose members dress as nuns.  In the face of protest from Christian fascists (mainly Catholic), this award was rescinded under pressure.  After an outcry from the LGBTQ community and many others, the award was reinstated.

The night of the Pride Game, Dodger Stadium was mobbed by over two thousand fanatically anti-women and anti-LGBTQ Christian fascists—festooned with Make America Great Again, Jesus signs,  and waving American flags.  They were joined by former Sheriff Villanueva—well known for protecting criminal gangs within the LA Sheriff’s Department.  The Archdiocese of LA mobilized parishioners saying that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence “desecrate the cross” and “profane the Eucharist.”  One of the organizers, “Catholics for Catholics,” called the sisters “Godless and Christ-mocking for their motto 'Go Forth and Sin and sin some more'.”  At one point the main entrance to the stadium was briefly shut down by these Catholic lunatics.

I can't help but feel a sense of affinity for the profane Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.  I remember them well from the late 70s and early 80s, having walked picket lines and attended demonstrations with them as they came decked out as pregnant nuns in black and white nun habits.  We shared a blasphemous spirit of sticking it to the newly rising tide of reactionary backlash to the rising women's rights and LGBTQ movements of the 60s and 70s.  Together we stood against the rise of the Christian fascist offensive against abortion.  We shared and mutually took pride in outrageous and mocking takedowns of Reagan-era morality.  In the face of fearmongering and vicious persecution of gay people at the start of the AIDS epidemic, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence openly passed out condoms as an act of defiance and survival, while we revolutionary communists were popularizing posters like these, which the Sisters I knew took particular pleasure in.

Over the last couple weeks, Christian fascists have targeted the LA school board‘s support of LGBTQ Month and called for the banning of  books like The Great Big Book of Families in the name of protecting children. This while the mobilization of Catholics at the Dodgers game was organized by the institution that is, hands down, the largest sexual predator of children on the planet!  It has to be said as straight up and harshly as possible—the fact that thousands of Christian zealots can march without being far outnumbered by the people who see the need to defend the rights of LGBTQ people is a sign that people are not taking this seriously enough!  Too many are living in the delusion that their own individual gender expression cannot be pushed back into the closet.  No, radical change is coming—whether it is reactionary or emancipating depends to a great extent on what we do.  So this calls for much more “blasphemy” as part of a righteous contempt for the future these fascists are trying to impose.  As part of getting to a new world—where the thousands of years of religious dogmas that have been used to institutionalize patriarchy, subordinate women and persecute anyone whose gender nonconformity is a challenge to male right becomes a chain that is finally and at long last shattered.