Sorry, I'm simply not reactive. Never was, never will be.
Can't do it, never could.
I was raised in a large, strictly Catholic, Irish/American, alcoholic, military family. Somehow I came kicking out of the womb a dyed-in-the-wool, screaming hardcore liberal. I faced the trials and tribulations of the conservative dinner table, knowing at the age of seven I was not born in original sin and at nine that I totally lacked faith in a Judeo-Christian god.
I insisted upon my right to personal privacy and dignity. I commanded my own body: I started taking the pill before I chose to lose my virginity. I picked my own friends and I read everything I could get my hands on. I refused to fear people because they spoke in different accents than me, they held a different religious tradition, their skin was a different color, or because they chose to love people in a different way than I did. I took drugs, had sex, got pregnant and had an abortion, and made a bunch of mistakes.
I was brow-beaten nightly at the dinner table (or the dinner battle as I came to think of it). I survived a series of nearly identical catholic elementary schools, one year at a girl's catholic high school, and two public high schools as we followed my father through his military transfers. Then I landed for two years in a catholic college, only to eject myself at the end of my sophomore year into work and travel to the west coast, where I finally found my intellectual home at U.C. Berkeley, All of these experiences strengthened my basic belief in compassionate humanism. I matured - My life educated me and I celebrated my maturation.
I don't know if my liberalism is a result of nature or nurture: Some hard-hidden seed of justice sown by my parents may well have taken root in my soul as social justice instead. I only know that at Berkeley I was finally in my right place, among a group of peers and thinkers who not simply respected and shared but actually APPRECIATED the values I cherished - education, social justice, free speech, intellectual rigor, diversity of thought and community, individual freedom and responsibility.
Simultaneous to this discovery of my liberal fellowship, I realized that my liberalism was not a REACTION to my family's patriarchal conservatism but rather a valid expression of a coherent value system that stands alone.
Now I am a mature adult - married for nearly two decades, middle-aged, and a mother, with children raised within my ethical structure and love.
To all my fellow liberals (or progressives, if that is how you name yourselves), I say this - Be proud.
Refuse the frame that cynical politicians and shallow media stamp upon you; the definition that liberals are simply those unfortunates who are liberal because they cannot be conservative - That we are as we are because we are flawed and weak, sinful and cunning, or just plain stupid.
Define yourselves not by the values you reject, but rather by the principles you hold true.