Discreet Espionage

As anyone who reads over at TMOG knows, I was raised in a very conservative Catholic household. Up until the age of eleven I thought that gay people hadn't existed prior to my generation ('gay' was an insult commonly used in my elementary and middle schools, but my parents never talked about gay people). The female role models I was given were Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, people I now think of as scary, backwards colluders. (Thanks for the cool word, Renee!) My sisters and I attended the local public school up through fifth grade, and when I was twelve and watching my sister Jenna's* fifth-grade class sing at a local holiday festival I remember inwardly scoffing at all the mentions of 'winter,' rather than 'Christmas' in the songs. Ooo yes, my parents were (and are) believers in 'the war on Christmas.' When I hear something about this so-called war now, I want to ask: "aren't Christians supposed to care about other peoples' feelings? Even if the people are, say, Jewish or Muslim or Hindu?"

I stopped considering myself conservative when I was seventeen after taking a five-question political quiz online (for American Government class, which is a long story unto itself) and receiving the answer that I was a liberal/libertarian. I identified as Libertarian for about a year, which was okay with my parents when I said I would still vote Republican (although I couldn't yet vote). But upon entering college I faced the facts that the Republican Party had very little to offer me. I was a pro-gay rights budding feminist, I was pro-choice, I had a ton of premarital sex and wasn't ashamed of it, and the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio had been rumored by my favorite alternative weekly to roam with neo-Nazis. I voted in the 2006 midterm elections for Ted Strickland (governor), Sherrod Brown (senator), and Stephanie Tubbs-Jones (representative, rest in peace), among others. Strickland had rumors floating around him about being 'secretly gay,' which was a scandal in conservative world, but which I a. don't believe; b. don't especially care about; and c. feel that it is the conservatives who are responsible for him feeling the need to be closeted in the first place, if it's true. I watched the election results from my local Planned Parenthood office while waiting for an appointment. People clapped as the results were announced and the Democrats just kept on winning.

This was also when I stopped identifying as Christian, after my parish priest decided to deliver a sermon all about how heaven was only open to Christians, something I did not agree with one bit. I hadn't believed in hell for a while, because the idea of a loving God not being able to forgive all of Hir (though at the time I would have used male pronouns for God) children was somewhat ridiculous to me. But my sister is a Buddhist and my boyfriend is Jewish and either one of them being banished from heaven (even though I don't think Jenna* believes in it...) made absolutely no sense to me.
And this was when I began hearing hate when I listened to my mother's conservative radio with her. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Michael Medved? None of them spoke to me anymore. Rush mocked the feminists? What the fuck, I was a feminist! And the hypocrisy of their Muslim-hate rubbed on me as well--particularly coming from the Catholic Hannity and Ingraham. From a historical perspective, Catholicism has been just as harmful to the world than Islam, if not more so*. (Google Spanish Inquisition, Papal Inquisition, Crusades, Pope Pius XII...)

Sometime in May my mother started asking me exactly what the goals of the modern feminist movement were. One of the things I mentioned? Ending rape.

"Well, that will never happen, that's just a fact of life," she responded.

Yes, right now it's a fact of life, a fact of my life, a fact she never allowed me to properly discuss with her. And I know it might be idealistic to think we can eradicate rape from the world, but why shouldn't I believe in the idea that someday we can?

But I continue to hear these things, continue to hear the idea that gay people don't deserve the same rights as heterosexual people do, and I am amazed. Amazed at the idiocy and the privilege.

But I have to hear it, have to hear the other side, have to know what we're fighting against. And know that I can never fall back into that world.










*this is not to say that either of these religions do not have their merits/many followers who are good people. I would never say that. Because it would be hypocritical.