The Black Sheep

I talked to Mom a few days ago on her birthday. Usually she asks if I want to talk to Dad, too. This time she didn’t. She asked if I was coming out for Thanksgiving: there’s going to be a big gathering of all the aunts and uncles and everyone in Mom & Dad’s newly completed house. But there’s no way I’m going to be able to afford the tickets. I’m sure the question will come up again for Christmas, and will have pretty much the same answer.

It’s an accurate enough answer, but it’s not the whole truth. The fact is that it’s a convenient excuse to not have to put her in the middle of a battle between her son and her husband. It saves me from having to tell her that I’d rather never see or speak to him again. It saves me from having to figure out how to include my mother in my life while leaving my father as far out of it as possible.

But My Camel is More Thinner!

I got the “the top 1% pay 99% of the income tax” and “our system of government needs to quit pitting the haves against the have nots” arguments today from my brother. He’s a smart guy, and a good guy, but he’s much more the son our parents had in mind than I am. He’s not quite as reflexively conservative as they are, and his taste in churches is somewhat more modern, but he’s still very much of the same mindset as the rest of my relatives: those lazy, crazy kids camped out on Wall Street need to get jobs and stop griping so they can hack off a hunk of the American dream for themselves and their kids. Enough with the protesting already!

I pointed out that his numbers were wrong: the IRS’s own data shows the top 3% of filers paid less than 30% of the overall income taxes paid in 2008 (the last year for which I could find that kind of data, but I’m doubtful the numbers moved very far in the direction he suggests). But there’s more I wanted to tell him.

In a Handbasket

Today was Mom’s birthday. So of course I called her, and we chatted about my new job and what was going on with her.

Mom’s always been a crafty, creative person. Apparently she’s always wanted to learn basket-weaving, which is something I never knew. (Parents – so full of surprises.) But she could never find a class to take when there was time to take it. Until she found one right there in her little corner of Kentucky, and it was scheduled for today of all days. So naturally she signed up, and spent the whole day weaving a basket. She was just tickled pink at the whole thing.

I’m proud of her. She doesn’t do enough things she really loves – another drawback of marrying a domineering stick-in-the-mud. And while I’ve never tried basket-weaving myself, I can imagine it’s challenging. I wouldn’t know where to begin. Plus how fun is it to do something you’ve always wanted to on your birthday?

My day was somewhat less fun. I feel bad for the guy training our class. They don’t have our computer access set up yet, which is really making a big crazy mess of his plans for the class. He’s quickly running out of ways to improvise and stuff to show us that doesn’t require computer access. And no matter how much he keeps after the IT folk to fix our access, he doesn’t seem to be getting much cooperation. So more improvising, more vamping, and all of it while he’s on the road and starting to come down with a cold.

Still, I’m having fun. I’m re-adjusting to the schedule. I’m learning my way around a building that’s laid out at diagonals to its walls rather than in the traditional grid pattern. I’m learning about the complexities and constrictions of the business.

Stuff is good.

The Pot Doesn’t Need Stirring, and the Ants Move Just Fine on Their Own

When I was maybe ten years old, I got into a World War II phase. My friends and I built all kinds of World War II models – ships, planes, tanks – and collected army men to have battles. We formed alliances. We developed grand master strategies for epic campaigns involving our little plastic toys. We debated “realism” – could this ship really defeat that one in battle? What about these two kinds of fighter? To this day I probably still have more information about the military technology of the Third Reich than is strictly healthy.

One day we were in my front yard, discussing the rules for one of our battles. The two friends I was talking to wanted to do something that I thought was unfair. And I was trying to convince them, but they were pretty set in their ways. I was convinced I was right. Apparently Mom was listening in from behind the screen door. She chimed in to say, “That’s right, you stick to your guns”. And I did, and we reached what I thought was the right decision.

Apostasy and Apoplexy

Sometimes I enjoy my apostasy.

Actually it’s not so much the apostasy itself I enjoy as the sense of freedom and “rightness”. My former faith brings a lot of meaning and beauty to the lives of millions, and I wish them all the very best of it. It’s not for me, and trying to live that way just made my life harder and smaller than it had to be. I feel like I can be a better person, stronger and healthier, living as an atheist. And it just makes more sense to me. I don’t feel like I have to tie my brain in pretzels to reconcile everything I believe. This makes me happier.

Sometimes I enjoy the way it bothers my relatives. It’s petty of me, I know. But I get a little bit of satisfaction from the whole “that’s not how he was raised” thing they think sometimes. They’re right, I wasn’t raised like that. And here I am. I’m not a homophobic bigot, I don’t deny the boatloads of truckloads of support for evolution, and I don’t insist that my ideas should have primacy because the people who holding them got here first and wiped out the people holding other ideas that already lived here. I don’t cling to a judgmental view that was expressly rejected two thousand years ago by the very person for whom my faith was named.

And I don’t call myself “persecuted” when things don’t go my way. Several GOP candidates (including Bachmann, Romney, and Santorum) have signed pledges to support a Constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples, appoint judges and an Attorney General who will oppose the right to gay marriage, and

 … establish a presidential commission on religious liberty to investigate and document reports of Americans who have been harassed or threatened for exercising key civil rights to organize, to speak, to donate or to vote for marriage and to propose new protections, if needed.

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) is a “nonprofit organization with a mission to protect marriage and the faith communities that sustain it.” I think their co-founder’s remarks express it more succinctly: “we fight gay marriage – and win”.

Well said, Ms. Gallagher. It’s not about making marriage stronger, it’s about keeping some people from getting married. It’s not about building up a stronger church and helping people in their daily walk with God – it’s about keeping some people from getting married. And we’re not talking about preventing men from exploiting young girls, or helping kids consider all the consequences before they jump into a lifelong commitment, or keeping abusers from marrying their victims to increase their control. We’re talking about keeping ordinary people from making the same commitment ordinary people have made to each other since time immemorial because we don’t like the fact that they’re a same-sex couple. They want to protect marriage from certain kinds of loving couples who want to get married.

Because that makes sense. It’s like the way we protect Idaho from invasion by forbidding left-handed Idahoids to join the military. (Yes, I know, they’re Idahoans. I think Idahoids is cooler. Like Californicons or Arizonobots.)

I’m sure there have been threats and harassment directed at opponents of same-sex marriage. (What an odd phrase. It’s like calling those who opposed the civil rights movement “opponents of racial equality”. It seems almost offensively understated.) And I think that’s wrong. There’s no excuse for threatening people who disagree with you. Violence and intimidation are unacceptable.

On the other hand, organizing boycotts of merchants who support the people that advocate treating you like second-class citizens or worse isn’t harassment. It’s exercising the freedom to organize and voting with your wallet. And, as my friend so eloquently put it on Facebook,

The right to free speech does not include the right to not hear a response. You aren’t being persecuted for “Christian” views … you are being responded to. Persecution comes at the end of a bat or a fist, at the end of the hand that keeps you from a partners death bed or funeral, at the constant denial of civil rights that the majority (YOU) take for granted. Being disagreed with is not being persecuted.

It’s shameful that some of our would-be leaders find it appropriate to sign a pledge to oppose civil rights and call that a defense of rights. It’s shameful that so many want to claim their bigotry as some kind of virtue. We’ve made so many changes over the last two hundred years. Racism isn’t dead, but at least it’s not so blatantly written into our shared institutions. Sexism still exists, but at least women can speak their minds, vote their consciences, and not be smothered into irrelevance under the guise of “protection”. It’s long past time to let all love speak its name proudly and publicly.