The mother of a two-year old boy says that while shopping at Walmart in Florida, a man didn’t like that her two-year old son was wearing a headband with a purple bow. So he called her son a “fucking faggot” and slapped his head.
Katie Vyktoriah, who describes herself as a stay-at-home mom and blogger at amotherthing.com says that an “overly large” man “with a bushy beard and a camouflage shirt with the arms cut off” screamed, “THAT’S a BOY?!” after hearing two girls ask about her two-year old son Dexter.
(UPDATE: amotherthing.com has been closed, apparently since this event.)
“With no notice, the man stepped forward, grabbed the headband off of Dexter’s head and threw it to the bottom of our shopping cart,” Vyktoriah writes at the Huffington Post:
He then cuffed Dexter around the side of his head (not hard, but that is not the point) and said with a big laugh, “You’ll thank me later, little man!”
At the same time as I stepped forward, Dexter grabbed his head where the man had smacked him and threw his other hand forward, stomping his foot and shouting, “NO!” I got between my son and this man and said very firmly, “If you touch my son again, I will cut your damn hands off.”
The guy snarled at me, looked at Dexter with disgust and said, “Your son is a f*cking fa***t.” He then started sauntering out, but not before he threw over his shoulder, “He’ll get shot for it one day.”
As if that weren’t enough, sadly, Vyktoriah notes:
Not a single person said or did anything. There were several people who had witnessed the encounter, but not one of them came over to offer support or console me or my son.
I was there with a 2-year-old and a 5-month-old baby, and my kid had been verbally and physically assaulted by a man. And no one did a thing.
She also notes that her son Dexter “loves to be Batman and Superman and Spiderman. He’s a real boys’ boy. He pretends he is flying, and he captures the baddies who threaten us,” and his “favorite color is pink. He loves Dora the Explorer. He has been known to wear my skirt as a dress, and he delights in cuddling with his mama.”
“THIS is what bigotry looks like,” Vyktoriah adds:
A grown man who should know better decided it was OK to step in and “teach” my child what it is to be manly. He thought it was OK to judge my child because he was not adhering to HIS idea of what a little boy should be. Clearly, the man was a homophobe, which is bad enough — but to attribute gay tendencies to a 2-year-old is as RIDICULOUS as attributing STRAIGHT tendencies to a 2-year-old. It just doesn’t compute!
A 2-year-old HAS no sexuality.
To think you can “teach” a child to be a certain way is unbelievable. Even if being gay is a lifestyle choice (which I don’t believe for a second), it is not a choice that a toddler can ever make.
…
But right now, the fact that homophobia is so rampant, that gay marriage is still seen as dirty because homosexuals are “lesser” somehow and don’t deserve to have the same rights as straight folk, that people like that man in Walmart even EXIST makes me fear for my kids and their futures.
While we may accept and support whoever our kids turn out to be, I am scared beyond words at what it would mean for them if they ARE gay. Why should anyone have to live in fear because they fall in love with someone that you or someone else doesn’t agree with? Why should mothers and fathers of gay kids have to have an extra layer of terror at night because they know that the world at large is against their child?
On Facebook, Vyktoriah adds that she’s had to take her blog down because of the huge traffic increase and because people are actually attacking her for this.
I am now getting phone calls at home and threats of pizza deliveries to my house because our personal information has been posted online.
Later she says that she contacted the police to protect her family.
Watch her on HuffPo Live:
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Image: Screenshot via HuffPo Live
Hat tip: Queerty