Get this straight, LGBTQ are like us

Let me begin with an admission. I have not always been straight. A teacher in the fourth grade said to me, “Norman, you may slump if you want, but sitting up straight is better.” It was many years later that I connected the word with more than my posture, or anyone’s.

There are about 9 million LGBTQ people in the United States. House Speaker Mike Johnson would criminalize some of their private behavior with another consenting adult. He cites the Bible and then the Constitution in a bizarre way that leaves me shaking my head. "There is clearly no 'right to sodomy' in the Constitution," Johnson wrote in a 2003. "And the right of 'privacy of the home' has never placed all activity within the home outside the bounds of the criminal law." I am not making this up. Those are his words.

I have had many LGBTQ friends over the years. Not one has asked about my sex life. I haven’t asked about theirs. We talk politics. We talk sports. We talk about the weather. What we don’t talk about is our sexual activities, habits, or pleasures.

What bewilders me is why anyone cares about anyone else’s sexual preferences, activities, or relationships. When asked, some respond that God made a man and a woman and that’s it. “It was Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, not Adam and Steve,” they smirk the same smirk every time I’ve heard it. Their breast beating is odd since their God made us all. He wasn’t having a bad day at the office when the first gay person was created.

To the best of my knowledge, not one of those millions were “turned” gay by hearing a teacher use the word or by reading it in a book. They are gay at birth and become our friends in every city in the United States. Add in a partner, parents for young and old and even a single sibling to those 9 million and you have certainly 20, maybe 30 million citizens who may deal with a depressed or suicidal beloved family member. I have known two teenage sons of friends who committed suicide, courtesy of the Mike Johnsons creeping around self-righteously.

I’ve known gay and lesbian couples whose faithful marriages have gone on for decades without, as best I can tell, cheating or playing around. Fidelity is not a hetero description only. I’ve known more than a few “traditional” marriages where one or both wandered.

Much, maybe close to all, of the grandstanding about LGBTQ comes from self-described religious folk. They help create an atmosphere for misery for many and early death some. Mike Johnson dedicated earlier phases of his career to limiting gay rights, including same sex marriage and health care access. He says there is “no constitutional right to gay behavior, that anti-gay protesters at one rally were "sharing the truth out of love and compassion," adding that the "truth" was based on a strict interpretation of the Bible.”

Mike Johnson is a miracle worker. I miss Jim Jordan. Since the speaker need not be a member, I think the Freedom Caucus should consider Dracula, or Dracula in drag, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Lauren Boebert

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary, and authored a memoir “From Nowhere to Somewhere.”