“And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.”
-Genesis 22:9-10 (King James Version)
CW: This piece includes discussion of suicide among LGBTQ+ youth. Also some gruesome Bible stuff.
Today at noon, LGBTQ+ and allied students in the Chandler Unified School District and at other high schools across Arizona are walking out of their classrooms to once again protest the indifference their school administration has shown to the lives of LGBTQ+ and especially trans youth.
Back in January, my friend Patti Serrano was sworn into the CUSD school board and has been the only one of the five board members to be a consistent ally and champion for these queer youth. Patti chose to take her oath of office on a copy of my book Life is a Banquet, which upset her fellow new board member, right wing nut job Kurt Rohrs. Kurt posted on Facebook (of course) about how he was sworn in properly, on a Bible.
I’m thinking about both my book and the Bible today. And not just because they are both poorly plotted and repetitive, but because of Life is a Banquet’s narrator, Isaac. Isaac is a teenager in Chandler whose evangelical parents kick him out when he comes out as queer. His story is based on the many queer people who have faced similar situations, which is why an estimated 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ+.
On a plot level, I always knew that the character would have a fairly generic Biblical name that his evangelical parents had chosen without much thought. For a while, he had my name, a classic “name any character from the Bible” standby. But then one day on Spotify I heard Johnny Cash’s voice boom: “God said to Abraham, kill me a son/Abe said ‘Man, you must be putting me on.’” It was Cash’s spoken word recitation of Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited,” which opens with that memorable summary of the Old Testament story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac.
I listened to Cash’s version of the song, and then Dylan’s version, and then went back to the actual story in Genesis. And in the story of a kid who is nearly killed by his religious zealot father because he thinks God told him to, I saw the story of all of those queer kids whose parents think God is telling them to let their kids die. And the more I went back to this deeply disturbing story, the more I saw it as a metaphor for the ways in which right-wing reactionaries are using queer children as sacrificial lambs.
If you were not raised in one of the Abrahamic faiths, or if it has been a while since Vacation Bible School, let’s briefly review Genesis 22. In order to “tempt” Abraham, God tells him:
“Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of” (Gen. 22:2).
Isaac is so loved because he his Abraham’s first “legitimate” child with his wife Sarah, a miracle baby given to him by God. (We don’t have time today to get into the fucked up story of Abraham’s actual first son, Ishmael, and his enslaved mother Hagar).
At this time, the pagan practice of burnt offerings (literally burning meat of slaughtered animals such as lambs or cows as an offering to the gods) was still a major component of Hebrew religion. Yahweh was not yet the all-powerful one true god of later monotheism. At this point, he was just one of many temperamental and jealous gods who had just happened to strike a special covenant with Abraham, father of the Hebrews. But now, to test Abraham’s loyalty, he was asking not just for a burnt offering of lamb, but of Abraham’s own son.
We don’t know what Abraham’s reaction to the news was. Unlike in Bob Dylan’s version, where he responds with disbelief, the Abraham of Genesis says nothing. Instead, in the very next verse Abraham is packing up his donkeys for the journey to the mountain. After three days, they arrive at the mountain and Abraham leaves the servants who have come with him and takes Isaac up the mountain alone, telling the servants:
“I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you” (Gen. 22:5).
And so Abraham and Isaac go up the mountain, and for the only time in the whole story we hear from Isaac, who starts to suspect something is up since they don’t have a lamb to sacrifice:
“Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” (Gen. 22:7).
In a bit of too-clever dramatic irony that would be funny if it weren’t so horrifying, Abraham reassures him:
“God will provide himself a lamb” (Gen. 22:8).
The next two verses, quoted at the top, are where shit gets real, as Abraham ties up Isaac, lays him on the altar, and raises his knife to cut Isaac’s throat. But then the Angel of the Lord says jk:
“Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me” (Gen. 22:12).
The Angel points Abraham to a ram that happens to be caught in the bushes nearby, which Abraham sacrifices in place of his son. Then Abraham receives his reward for his devotion. In exchange for his willingness to slit his son’s throat, Abraham gets to figuratively and literally shoot his semen across “all the nations of the earth”:
That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice. (Gen. 22:17-18)
And so in this story of the original patriarch, we get an almost too on-the-nose description of the toxic patriarchal ideas that infect so much of modern right-wing religion, and white evangelical Christianity in particular.
Isaac’s function in the story is purely as property. The tradition of burnt offering was meant to honor the gods for the bounty of a good hunt by offering them the first and choicest cut of meat, in the same way that in many patriarchal households, it is still standard for the father to get served first at dinner and to get “the big piece of chicken,” to quote a classic bit of misogyny from Chris Rock. Only now, Isaac is the choice cut of meat being sacrificed. This reflects the common understanding of children as property in early agrarian societies such as ancient Israel. Children were hands to work the field, on a level with women, slaves, and animals.
And while modern evangelicals weaponize sentimentalist rhetoric about the “innocence of children” when trying to ban books about gay penguins, it is clear that they in many ways still see children in this way. The cult of progeneration, of a man’s power being judged by how many offspring he can produce, is still alive and well in opposition to birth control and abortion, and in religious traditions that emphasize childbearing, such as the Latter-Day Saints and the Quiverfull movement. And the idea of children as cheap labor explains why the same Republicans banning Drag Story Hour are trying to revive more traditional childhood activities like getting your arm caught in a threshing machine.
But the way in which this story is most instructive of modern right-wing (and often “centrist”) ideas of children and parenthood is who the story is focused on: Abraham. Besides his question to Abraham about why they aren’t bringing anything to sacrifice, Isaac is entirely missing from the story. We know nothing of what he is thinking before, during, and after being tied up and nearly murdered by his father. It is all about Yahweh’s weird psychological games with Abraham.
This reminds me of the now-infamous 2018 cover of The Atlantic that really kicked our current panic over trans kids into high gear. The story, written by anti-trans propagandist Jesse Singal, says ominously: “Your Child Says She’s Trans. She Wants Hormones and Surgery. She’s 13.” As journalist Michael Hobbes pointed out on a recent excellent podcast on the trans panic, the “you” in that first sentence is parents, not trans kids themselves. And this focus on parents would continue through a wave of similarly panicky stories in prestige publications over the next few years.
In all of these stories, the main focus is never a trans kid who is suffering from gender dysphoria and seeking out gender-affirming care to ease their pain. It is always a parent who is “supportive” but “has questions.” And these parents often join weird Facebook groups and get introduced to thinly veiled anti-trans propaganda and those questions quickly evolve from “Are you sure you’re trans?” to “Is trans even a real thing?” to “Is ‘trans ideology’ a plot by the Jews to undermine American values and weaken our military and bring about the New World Order?”
But despite this, we are always asked in these articles to sympathize with the parents and be endlessly patient with them. We are supposed to sympathize with their dilemma as the child they see as their property starts asserting an identity different than the one the parents envisioned for them.
The actual children are largely absent in the stories. And when they are present, their private medical histories are broadcast in national publications and they are told “that’s not how this works” when they object to being used as political pawns. Or they are simply ignored when they ask school board members and administrators to support them.
So despite all their Helen Lovejoy-esque wailing about “the children,” actual children are, like Isaac, only incidental for these right-wing zealots currently leading a holy war against queer and trans youth.
As is a known fact for anyone who cares to know, rates of suicide among trans youth are terrifyingly high. And gender-affirming care reduces those rates. And there is also plenty of evidence that having affirming school environments can also reduce those high rates of suicide.
And so, it stands to reason that when a state passes restrictions on gender-affirming care and makes that care harder or impossible to access, as many states have done this year, those suicide rates go back up. And when school board members sit in silence and ignore the LGBTQ+ students who come to every school board meeting for a year and literally plead with them to do more to support them, suicide rates among LGBTQ+ students are going to continue to be horrifyingly high.
But that is a little too abstract a way to put it. So let’s be clear what that means:
Kids are going to die.
Kids who would not have died if they had access to gender-affirming care or had supportive school environments.
The decisions of these politicians and school administrators, and everyone else who spreads bullshit propaganda about “gender ideology” and “groomers,” leads to kids dying.
The politicians who pass these laws know this and are OK with it. The school boards who ignore the pleading of LGBTQ+ students know this and are OK with it. They are OK with a certain number of children dying in their state every year if it means asserting their power and upholding some bullshit idea of cisnormative patriarchy, just like Abraham being willing to slit his own kid’s throat if it means proving his loyalty to God and spreading his seed across Palestine.
Because as it was so succinctly put on a sign photographed by a good friend of mine at a recent protest, “Every Trans Suicide is a Murder.”
If your god is telling you that honoring him is worth slitting kids’ throats, do what Abraham should have done and tell him to fuck off and find a new god.