Romans 1:26-27

Romans 1:26-27

When my Grandma Shirley Dennis died, the only thing I took from her house was her Bible because she’s the first person I ever heard call someone a f*ggot.

“A what?” 5-year-old me said, innocently.

“A f**, a fruit, a fairy, a queer, someone who diddles kids.”

“What is diddling a kid,” I thought, but was too shy to ask.

I can still feel the plush maroon seats of her 1989 Lincoln Town Car and the burn on my skin of a heavy-metal seatbelt latch left too long in the sun at the mall that day. I remember every detail. I just wanted the conversation to be over because it was obvious she was saying something to me that was inappropriate to be saying to a five year old.

Shirley eventually liked that I worked at William Jewell College because she thought herself to be a strong Baptist and, “this little girl that goes to my church works in the office over there” — which is the funniest way I’ve ever thought of the person to which she was referring and what their actual role was at the college.

You are who you go to church with.

When I told that story in a debate van once, a student volunteered that her uncle taunted her at holiday meals because she was going to “Billy Jewell Queer College,” which we instantly reclaimed and re-appropriated. Her Uncle didn’t like it when William Jewell separated from the Southern Baptist Convention under the leadership of David Sallee, so mega-queer we became.

William Jewell shared three important beliefs with my Grandma Shirley Dennis, they both believed in the biological inferiority of Black people, used the Bible to justify actions in their lives and believed their personal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.

I opened her Bible yesterday for the first time since I took it from her house in 2019. There’s a sum total of *three*…. THREE…. hand-written notes in the entire Bible:

(Inside the front)

Romans 1.26-27

Lev 18.22

(*And again in the back I assume just for good measure* )

Lev 18.22

750 pages of the supposed word of God and that there are literally zero other annotations leaves no-doubt she treated this Bible as a weapon with a table-of-contents for divine hatred. William Jewell was a Baptist enslaver who no-doubt did the same. Please tell me how thoroughly he was reading his bible again? Why I’m not a Christian? It’s at least somewhat because of my Grandma Shirley and William Jewell.