There’s a particular kind of horror that settles into your bones when you grow up in a world where men twice your size and three times your age believe God gave them authority over your body. It’s not abstract or symbolic; it’s physical. They act like scripture grants them permission to touch, punish, or “discipline” children in whatever way they see fit. When you’re young and small, you don’t know that adults are supposed to protect you. You just know you’re trapped in a place that treats obedience as holiness and silence as virtue. Predators don’t need masks when they can hold a Bible, and victims don’t need chains when fear keeps them obedient and paralyzed.

It’s terrifying as a child when someone so much older and bigger than you touches you sexually. Everything in you shuts down at once. Your body flips into freeze or flight, over and over, a loop that never resolves. Eventually the body does what it has to do — it gives in or gives out. The abuse becomes a pattern, the fear becomes muscle memory, and the adults around you pretend not to see because faith makes convenient blindfolds. The last time my family and I talked face to face, we brushed against these truths — my family's open bigotry, the generational silence, the way every uncomfortable truth gets wrapped in prayer and buried under the word “tradition.” When I chose to visit them openly, authentically, without shrinking myself to fit their faith, it was enough to end the relationship entirely. We haven’t spoken in years.

But the part that still stings isn’t the distance — it’s the loyalty to a hierarchy that demands silence. The elder worshippers cling to the commandment to “honor” their parents and grandparents, no matter how cruel, ignorant, or harmful those elders are. The new media tells them that America is the best and nothing is better than when someone old male and white pushes cruelty as protection and because of the bible's conditioning them to believe that the very sky daddy they worship is also jealous and maniacal and murderous, just like grandpa they'll think without even knowing it. They sit in living rooms where Fox “News” blares nonstop, nodding along as if the world outside their silo doesn’t exist. Their sons and daughters sit quietly beside them, afraid to challenge the old guard, afraid to disrupt the ritual of unquestioned reverence. Meanwhile the queer kids, the trans kids, the nontraditional families — the ones actually at risk — are left to fend for themselves. This isn’t a call to the ones who are hurting. This is for the old people who refuse to grow and refuse to die, who choose willful blindness over compassion and expect the rest of us to call it respect.