I would rather be dead than come out of the closet, some gays say, but I don’t

   I and my sister heard that a lot in the Christian group and the small community in western Norway we grew up. We also witnessed how several people acted on it. We suffered under the yoke, until we practically ran away to the nearest big city in our late teens, and could finally be ourselves.

  Bergen, the big city measured by Norwegian standards was, is more open, but we keep facing the same prejudice we did in the small community. It’s more concealed, but very much present.

  We were told by our father, the priest that there were two inferior people in the eyes of God. One was women. The other was people performing «beastly acts». We didn’t know what he meant during most of our childhood, but, as stated we found out. He was talking about homosexuals.

  We discovered that the prejudice wasn’t limited to Christians either. We encountered many other seemingly free-spirited people with the same hateful, practically pathological bias. When looking at the current western society, it’s not really strange, I guess, since we still live in a basically patriarchal society, where some both males and females insist that victims of rape share the blame. And don’t even mention transgenders that are really getting trashed lately, also by professed feminists. JK Rowling has led on in that crusade, and she is a hero to many, people not questioning her warped views at all.

  There is something profoundly sick about modern human society. Some of it is remains from less enlightened times and oppressive communities, but there is something more that isn’t necessarily a result of that, but of a general, ongoing, persistent intolerance. People insist, for instance that women and men are equal, now, that there is no more need of feminism, and they’re not kind about it.

  What they’re really saying when they say that is that there was never a need for feminism. Feminism is even blamed for many of the wrongs. We meet such people on the Web often. It’s hilarious every time the perpetrators of rape and prejudice and vicious misogynist acts play the victim, but also very sinister, since many people keep supporting that twisted opinion.

  And there’s something even deeper and twisted, a message repeating itself endlessly in almost all communities: Don’t stand out. If you do, prepare to be taken to the court of public opinion or worse.

  Every time you encounter a male supremacist, a lover of rape, you look incredulous at him, because such crappy human beings exist. But they do. There are loads of them.