Member-only story
LOVE AND HATE
Rainbows Can Mean More Than One Thing
How could seven colors in a row possibly make you upset?
After reading another great article by James Finn (linked here and below), I couldn’t grasp how someone could be so full of hatred for people who are different that the mere viewing of a rainbow could cause them to be “sick”. After reading the associated article (read it free here), the even more fucked up idea is that someone could take it so seriously as to get the library’s board involved and eventually fire people for “rainbows”.
When my daughter was very little, she proclaimed that her favorite color was “rainbow”, as I’m sure happens often with small children who can’t quite make up their minds.
She proclaimed for anybody who would listen, or any adult who would ask that she refused to pick a single color and had settled quite firmly on rainbow as her favorite. We backed her up and allowed her to dress in rainbows, buy everything from rainbow sprinkles to rainbow shoes, and rainbow paper for drawing the pictures of rainbows that inevitably came into being anytime she was near a box of crayons. There were rainbow face paintings, rainbow stickers on every available surface, rainbow colored slime, and 7-layer rainbow birthday cakes baked special by Grandma (see above). Rainbows made…
