#bigots are going to scream and read pride into everything even where it wasn't intended so you might as well enjoy as loudly as possible

[mixingpumpkins]

God forbid there are colors

Literally.

I’m begging y’all celebrating Pride to be as loud and proud as you can, not just because you deserve to celebrate, but because people in churches are full of the most paranoid, self-centered idiocy about it to the point where I got woken up unnecessarily early today for an “emergency” to cater to said idiocy. And if I have to hear paranoid screaming about Pride first thing in the morning, you’re damn right I want everyone to have the biggest, loudest, most joyful Pride month yet.

Context: Among my side gigs, I’m webmaster for a few churches’ websites, because a paycheck’s a paycheck, it’s not too demanding of my time, and my work is the reason they have all their sermons and events live-streamed/archived on their sites every week in case, y’know, they’re ever saying shit that might involve someone looking into their tax-exempt status.

I usually set up all the back-end video streaming stuff on Saturday and try to use a topical picture from our photo subscription as a background for both the video thumbnail and the post thumbnail. As requested, I also try to post the service bulletins along with the videos, but one pastor has a habit of not sending me the bulletin before my midnight-the-night-before deadline, so at that point it’s agreed that I’ll just use a seasonal nature picture as the thumbnail photo and upload the bulletin whenever I get around to it on Sunday. (Most of the photos for that church, consequently, end up being nature photos.)

This morning, Housemate #2 — who is on a million committees in that church with Housemate #1 — comes screaming into my room at ass o’clock, telling me I need to fix the website now, the pastor even contacted her about it, etc. etc. (I don’t believe her because she said she couldn’t show me a text or email because she “deletes them immediately” — and also the pastor emailed me the bulletin/notes to add to the post long after the post was already up yesterday and didn’t say a word about any fixes needed.)

Y’all. She was mad because the image on this week’s post was a “rainbow.” To be clear, it was this: 

So of course, I’m like, “...??? It’s a field of flowers.” Because it’s a field of flowers that’s colorful, but pretty damn clearly not a rainbow. 100% wasn’t even on my radar as rainbow — my search term in our image subscription was “summer.” (Housemate even went to a flower festival a few weeks ago and hinted that I should use a very similar photo that she took the next time I needed a nature pic for this church’s video thumbnail.)

But she’s insisting this picture is basically a rainbow and they can’t have anything that looks like Pride and how could I do this, I clearly did this on purpose, change it now to something that can’t be misconstrued, etc.

Fine. Wake me up, invade my space, scream, be bigoted, falsely accuse me of malicious intent ... Cue malicious compliance.

She’s hovering over me as I open up the church’s image subscription and all the places I need to go change settings and whatever to update the site. I conspicuously type in “summer” so she can see that this pops up among totally inappropriate ones like beach balls and kids playing in sprinklers. I point it out to her and start scrolling through the images to find a different nature pic. She tries to point out other ones.

“Use that one.”

“I’ve already used that one.” (Just a few weeks ago, in fact. They do not want repeat images.)

“What about that one?” She points to a different field of flowers that is actually the lesbian flag. Like, actually, obviously the lesbian flag. Housemate is not up on these things because she is too pure to know such sordid details; she only knows rainbows = gay = bad. As funny as this would be, I guarantee there would actually be screaming from people if I posted a literal lesbian pride flag made of flowers instead of a random colorful field of flowers, so I decide to save myself a little trouble and point out the issue.

“Lesbian pride flag.”

“This one?”

“Too small.” (I pull it up on the canvas and resize, to demonstrate that it turns into unintelligible pixel hell.)

“Here. These are flowers. They’re pink, yellow, and blue.”

“That is literally the pan pride flag.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Pansexual. Pride. Flag.” I pull up a picture of that so she can see.

“Well, it’s Trinity Sunday, search for that instead.”

I do. There’s a few too-small pictures of doves and a bunch of triskele and triquetra knots. She points to one of those. “There. The Trinity symbol. Use that.”

“That’s a pagan symbol. I wouldn’t want that to be misconstrued.” Incidentally, I point out, as I open the middle-of-the-night email with the bulletin boasting a similar picture, someone should probably remind the pastor about that since he’s so worried about people misinterpreting images as something non-Christian.

She’s grinding her teeth at this point. “That’s different. That has words [Father, Son, Holy Spirit] around it.”

“It’s still a very recognizable appropriated pagan symbol. Or would you be fine posting a swastika just because it has different words around it?”

We go back to nature photos.

“Try this one.”

“That’s really close to the bi pride flag, you know.”

“HERE. THIS ONE.”

Very thick pale pink and white flowers ... under a blue sky. Hmm. Looks very much like the trans pride flag, if I’m honest. She’s pissed, and housemates are going to be late for church soon.

“There. Those white daisies.”

“Yeah, we can do that, but you should know this picture does look like the agender pride flag if you’re just glancing at the colors.”

“I don’t care. I don’t know what that is. Nobody normal knows what that is, they’re not going to misconstrue it.”

“Hmm, I don’t know, since apparently that was the issue with the first picture, but I’ll use this one.” I upload it and fix all the things that need to be fixed on various platforms for everything to update. She stomps out and I go back to sleep.

Five minutes later she’s back, waving her phone in my face. “YOU DIDN’T CHANGE THE PICTURE! IT’S STILL THE RAINBOW PICTURE! CHANGE IT NOW!”

This is two times I’ve been given a mini-heart attack this morning by someone barging into my space while I’m trying to sleep, and she’s lucky she hasn’t gotten maced on instinct. “You watched me change the picture. Clear your browser cache.”

“I don’t know how to do that. Change the picture!”

I grab my laptop again, go to the website, and show her the picture is changed. I rattle off an explanation of why she needs to clear her phone’s browser cache, which I have given her several times before, and remind her she’s late. She blanks out at anything tech-talk and leaves. Totally looking forward to getting more screaming about this later. 🙃

You know, that “rainbow” picture was 100% an honest mistake, but I think part of this week’s pay from that church specifically is going to go to an actual rainbow shirt from an LGBT-owned shop. ✌️