DISCLAIMER: Discrimination is ridiculous. Especially when the ability to discriminate hides behind the veil of victimization, like the religious liberty bills that have been proposed throughout the US this year. These bills would give devout shop owners the right to deny service to members of the LGBT community.
The following isn’t simply a parody of this ironic situation, it’s a callback to a prejudice against another segment of the population. They too were discriminated against for religious reasons. They too have a trait that can be found in 1 in 10 members of the population, and they too cannot change the way they are despite efforts to convert them.
The following is written from the perspective of someone with a strong prejudice against them.
The Lord’s Right Hand
This month, Mississippi passed the Religious Liberties Accommodations Act. This gives establishments the ability to deny service to people whose lifestyles conflict with management’s sincerely held religious beliefs. This a godsend for a religious restaurateur like me. My staff and I have struggled with providing service to a segment of the population that our faith teaches us are in living in sin.
These are the costumers who draw attention to themselves with their backwards etiquette, bumping elbows, and the violating other patrons’ personal space. Their very existence challenges the biblical definition of place setting.
I’m, of course, referring to left-handed people, those dexterity defilers who ignore the Lord’s word, for as a literal reading of the bible shows God has a preference for which hand should be dominant:
Ecclesiastes 10:2 says, “A wise man’s heart is at his right hand; but a fool’s heart at his left.”
Matthew 25: 33 says, “And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left.”
Or as Christ himself says in Matthew 6:3 “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.”
As a bible literalist I can’t ignore the scripture’s 100 favorable references to the right-hand and its 20 negative references to the left.
This is why I maintain a rights-only establishment. My corkscrews are consecrated, my can-openers are canonized, and my knife sets are sanctified. I can’t have any of my utensils sullied by those who prefer their execrable extremities. Those inverted perverts would smear their feelers down my purified peelers, dig their claws into my sparkling spatulas, and corrupt my majestic measuring cups (by looking at the metric side).
Thou shalt not make crooked cuts in my kitchen. Thou shalt not stack a lopsided ice cream cone, and thou shalt not spill a single drop of wine because thou struggles with the opening mechanism.
Protect Another Space From the Left-Handed Menace
The Religious Liberties Accommodations Act gives me the freedom to fire any of the mixed-up-messes that sneak through my hiring process. It gives me the authority to 86 any patron using the wrong digits to hold their bacon, and to deny a ticket to any of the wrong wristed wrecks waiting at my coatcheck.
I’ve trained my staff to identify these directionally confused individuals, from the way they get tangled in the credit card machine to their cross-armed handshakes, and silver stained hands. These disoriented derelicts stick out like sore thumbs covered in spiral notebook lines. They pace around the foyer fumbling with wristwatches. They beg strangers for help getting their jackets on.
We usually deny service to these signature smudgers before they’re too far through our doors. The Accommodations Act has exorcised my eatery, baptized my barbecue, and consecrated my coatroom, but there’s one part of the establishment that remains unclean.
Too many of these satanic southpaws slip through our righteous ranks by making a beeline for the bathroom.
The constitution isn’t designed to force private individuals to provide services to every phalange fetishist that walks into our water closets. Their peculiar powder room procedures make our patrons uncomfortable. These ham-fisted hobos struggle with their zippers, reposition toilet paper, misplace plungers, and fumble with the faucets.
I need the government to allow me to mount cameras in every urinal to check which hand men use to pee with. I need the state to reward lavatory vigilantes for peeking over stalls to see what direction their neighbors wipe in. I need to be able to give washroom attendants the authority to check how women handle products for their feminine hygiene.
I need a bathroom bill with bite.
Lest you think my religious bias informs my every opinion, let me stress that this is a safety concern. I can’t have these left-handed lunatics spraying their unhinged hoses on unsuspecting innocents. I can’t have them drawing pentagrams in poop, or trying to flush in the wrong direction and flood the whole establishment.
Do Not Be Bewitched by these Leftromancers
My critics will say that this is nothing more than left-hands-panic. They’ll say the equal protection clause in the constitution makes it so businesses must provide public accommodations to everyone regardless of race, gender, or handedness, but that negates my nuanced reading of the biblical texts.
These left-handed lefties will have you believe they can’t help the way they were born, that they reached for the rattle with the same hand they’re raising in this cultural battle, but don’t fall for their preference propaganda. Their leanings aren’t hormonal or genetic. These second controller wielding, European side of the street driving, manga page turning leftists are the direct result of demonic influence.
During the Salem Witch Trials “psychical abnormalities” such as left-handedness were grounds for persecution. See, there’s already a legal precedence.
All I ask is for more protections of my first amendment right to show these metacarpal mediums the light, to rid my public toilets of these counterclockwise conjurers, and to safeguard myself from litigation from these leftromancers.
End Satire, onto My Actual Opinion
The sad thing I learned while researching both of my rants on left-handed people is that this form of prejudice isn’t that far in the past. There are still people who believe the sun rotates around the earth, that homosexuality is a sin, and that left handedness is a sign of demonic influence.
The thing is there are no bills to ban heliocentric theory in schools, even though a literal interpretation of the bible got Galileo Galilei sentenced to house arrest for the last twenty-years of his life. There are no bills preposed to try to convert left-handed students into right-handed ones, even though Catholic schools have had a long history of trying to do so.
Biblical interpretations have changed to conform to obvious realities, they can continue to do so. While there are 6 scriptures in the bible that refer to homosexuality, there are, as the above character accurately stated, a hundred verses that favor right-handedness.
This was all supposed to seem like an absurd farce, but really there is a lot of truth in jest.
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(Special thanks again to http://lefthanded-problems.tumblr.com and the hashtag #LeftHandedProblems on Twitter for inspiring many of the references here).
Has your right eye started twitching, yet? Is your right hand getting weaker and have you noticed a pronounced limp with your right leg? Being a third generation leftie and the mother of two leftie offspring, I have the power to turn you into an honorary left-handed-footed-eyed person but I have no power over the right side of your brain, which controls your awesome leftiness. So now you really are in a fix. Have a great week – what’s ‘left’ of it. 😉
I have to say that what you posted is funny. The sad thing is that people look for any excuse to discriminate others and put people down. I remember my mom telling me that there were teachers trying to get me to write with my right hand. But they gave up on it.
I’ll tell you few other tidbits that my add fuel to this fire, Drew:
1. There are 4 to 6 verses regarding “homosexuality” (in the broadest terms) in the Bible, depending on the version.
2. The original Greek for this concept is no longer in use and therefore has no clear interpretation. This would cover all New Testament uses. Some versions interpret the word “homosexual,” while others interpret it “crossdresser” and still others “effeminate.” In actuality, based on the components, it most likely meant something like “troll” today: an older man who prostitutes young boys or trades sex for necessities like food.
3. The Old Testament references lie between positive references to having multiple wives and advocating for women to leave town during every period. Unless “literalitsts” (i.e., people who don’t know enough to even understand the literal meaning, which involved cultures and customs long dead) want to embrace all of the “rules,” they shouldn’t even be given a legal second glance today. That is, they should be dismissed for not really being literalists, or they should be required to include all 750+ archaic Jewish laws in their petitions.
I can sit down with any proponent of such absurdity and, as someone who has read the entire Bible several times, including studying the original languages, shut down their arguments in five minutes (as well as offer a cohesive rational for why what they think it meant even then was not, in fact … what it meant).
This was heavier than my typical comments, but it seemed appropriate.