I've spent that last two weeks researching and writing about the dangerous problem of Christian Nationalism, a depressing and frightening terrain to explore. There was a brief detour to get snarky about Laura Mallory, the Gwinnett County fundy Mom who is trying (again to get Harry Potter banned from public school bookshelves because she believes it promotes Wicca -but even she represents Christian Nationalism at its lowest common denominator. I just took a long, hot shower, and have washed Rousas Rushdoony and Pat Robertson and the institutes for Religion and Democracy out of my hair--and am left feeling sad.
Why sad?
Because these people truly hate and fear anything that is different or new or not just like them 110%, from children's books to music to human beings. Pretty much everything and everyone they disapprove is sinful--and, while they claim to hate sin but love the sinner, you only have too look at the way they treat those they call sinners to realize the hypocrisy of this. Try to enter a Planned Parenthood clinic to get routine ob/gyn care, and hear yourself called a "Nazi" and a "babykiller" and a "murderer." The venom and loathing come up cross clearly. Attend a Gay Pride, and see the disgust and in the eyes of those holding anti-gay signs telling the marchers they are unnatural or sick or anathema in eyes of God. Talk to the Wiccans at Fort Hood whose open circles were disturbed for several years by the flock of a local Baptist minister who accused them of devil worship and whose protests became so inflammatory that base security stepped in to protect the witches from the loving Christians. Sometimes being different can get you killed, as it did Matt Shepherd, the gay college student who was beaten to death and tied to a fence in a position eerily reminiscent of crucifixion, or Brandon Teena, the transgendered teen who was murdered because he wanted to be a man and, like many TGs, lived as one while saving for his surgery.
I know a little about being different. My sisters-in-law and one of my nieces (the other one would likely have participated but she wasn't present for the conversation" recently told my mother-in-law that they would be unable to attend any holiday get-togethers with the family while my husband and I live under her roof. We live with her only because we have no other choice. We're right at the poverty line financially because we live on his Navy pension, and most of his VA bennies go for college tuition and books. We've made lots of concessions to do this, including agreeing not to practice our Wiccan faith anywhere at any time while we live under her roof. My husband does the yard work, and shops for her Pre-K every week, and spent 14-8 hours minimum every weekend this summer painting the Pre-K and stripping and waxing all the classrooms (none of her other children lifted a finger to help when they lived here at various times in their lives).
As far as we can see, the main issue is our religion, our understated Goth tendencies (limited to my husband wearing poet's shirts and thigh-high boots with jeans to Christmas dinner; NO make-up for me, and I dress in a look that is actually quite choice: elegant gypsy, with flowing skirts and peasant blouses) and the fact that we don't love the South. Apparently having non-Christians in the family, even ones who don't practice their faith overtly or wear its symbols or discuss it with them, makes them "uncomfortable." When pressed for an example of how we did this, they told MIL that at Christmas, after enduring two hours of snotty comments directed at us by one niece--as well as a running stream of put-downs at her poor boyfriend--I finally excused myself, took my plate, and moved to the living room, where I didn't have to enable said niece by pretending her remarks were acceptable in polite company. That, they said, was a snub. When my husband pointed out the reason we left, my mother-in-law didn't say a word--she had heard the horrid comments, and she knew we were right, but admitting this would mean facing the fact that her granddaughter is not a very nice person instead of the "sweet girl" she so desperately wants to see in her. The conversation between my husband and his mother got loud and angry--and she told him he had changed since he'd left home (hell, he left at age 19, and he turns 50 next Wednesday; he's visited every country and Europe, several in the Middle East and North Africa and spent ten years in Japan; if he hadn't changed he'd have had to be braindead). What she really meant was that he wasn't like everyone else in the family who have never lived further than an hour away from the town where they graduated from high school. To her, that change, that difference was NOT an improvement.
I don't know where we'll be living if my Dad doesn't sell his house and move up here so we can care for him (I worry when I call him in FL and he doesn't answer I have to restrain myself from calling the police to check on him; he's 86 and he has Parkinson's). Maybe under a bridge or an overpass--low income housing isn't a possibility because we don't meet the qualifications.
But once again I saw the high cost of being different.
I should be accustomed to it by now. I've been different all my life. I was in 7 different schools by the time I graduated from high school. I was perpetually the New Kid, which makes you unpopular, and I was the Smart Kid, the top of my class every year until high school where he slipped to top 5 or ten. I was unathletic, which made me the last choice for any team sport. I cried a lot about being teased, but never told my parents because I didn't want to hurt their feelings. Instead, I became very self-reliant, read a lot, and acted out long elaborate stories with my paperdolls. When I hit ten, I wrote the stories down.
The worst time was junior high, where I was against he New Kid--and smarter thant he current Smart Gile, who also happened to be the Popular Girl, an Irish-Catholic version of Hilary Faye in Saved. We had assigned seats at lunch, and the group I got stuck, except for one friend, made life miserable. When they discovered I have a weak stomach--when someone brought in a cow's knee bone split in half for science, it entered by the front door of the classroom and I exited through the back, the one and only time I didn't ask permission to hit the bathroom--they found the most disgusting stories to tell over lunch.
I dreaded going to school, but didn't tell my parents about the harassment. I didn't wan them to be disappointed in me. Mom had always been so popular--class officer three years in high school, lots of friends and boyfriends. A number of times, when I knew we'd having science, I got on the city bus, rode it to school, and then rode it home, because my anxiety had made me sick to my stomach. Looking back, I was probably clinically depressed, but when you're only 11 and it's 1962, you just think of it as being miserable. That came to an end when a kind-hearted and observant African American woman noticed the pattern and took me by the hand and asked me what was wrong. She was probably late for work that morning because she walked with me to the school and sat down with the principal, who was, blessedly, a nun with a heart, and then the three of us talked about the situation. Mother St. Anne took me downstairs and made me a cup of tea and told me she would put a stop to this immediately. While I drank the tea in the cafeteria, she called the tormentors in and told them that if she heard one more word about their behavior, she was going to speak with their parents. She changed my seat in the lunch room, and arranged with my teacher for me to write something on the topic if it involved animal parts. I didn't become Miss Popularity--but at lest they left me alone after that.
I really didn't find a peer group until I joined science fiction fandom and the SCA where my creativity, my peculiar sense of humor, my scholarly bent and my clothing design skill were regarded as pluses rather than minuses. I made lifelong friends, and met two husbands through those two groups, where abnormal was the New Normal.
Here's the truth that my tormentors and my sisters-in-law don't get: we are all of us, each and every one, unique, which means we are ALL different. Some of us just happen to be different in ways the prevailing culture approves of more than others. My mother-in-law once suggested that I could fit in if only I really wanted to. In one way, she was right. I could give up the flowing gypsy skirts and peasant blouses and Victorian skirts and lace shirts and laced turn of the century boots--and start wearing little floral dresses with puffed sleeves and lace collars like the older sister-in-law does, or don khakis and Fair Isle sweaters as she does. I could give up my belief system and learnt o sing "Onward Christian Soldiers" and start attending a Southern Baptist or Methodist church every Sunday. I could stop talking about anything more controversial than the weather tand the Christmas decorations (the weather is too controversial; when I said something about their being no need for it to be 90+ degrees for 6 solid weeks, that was taken as a criticism of the South and I paid for it) . I could stop thinking and start watching Nancy Grace.
But I won't because that would require me to be someone other than who and what I am. I have toned down my dress as much as possible, and still be able to look at myself in the mirror. I don't discuss religion at all--mine or theirs (weird thing is the older sister-in-law LOVES Nora Roberts' Three Sisters trilogy with Wiccan heroines--but apparently witchy women are more acceptable in the pages of a book than in the flesh). I don't discuss politics at all, ever, because well, what you can you say to someone with all but Ph.D in Gifted Ed who says she voted for Bush because Gore acted like he smart and knew it (I think she voted against Kerry for the same reason, though I never bothered to ask). I don't flaunt my difference, but they know I am Not Like Them, and that is enough to make them "uncomfortable."
So for all of us who didn't fit in--the geeks, the nerds, the D&D players and the LARPers, the Goths and the brains--here's a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins to help you remember that different is beautiful in its own unique way. This Catholic priest, who suffered from depression his entire life and who fought through many dark nights of the osul was one of us.
Pied Beauty
GLORY be to God for dappled things,
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow,
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced, fold, fallow and plough,
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange,
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;
Praise him.
And for my sisters-in-law: you are the ones with the problem, you sad, closed-minded women who can't handle anyone who isn't a clone. How small and atrophied your hearts and souls must be, and how much fear they must contain. I don't hate you. I don't even dislike you. Instead, I pity you. You're too terrified of change to question anything you were taught, too frightened of new experiences to live anywhere but the place you were raised, too unnerved by people who don't think exactly like you to reach out and take a risk. We challenge you, and therefore you must banish us from your life. It's your loss--we're actually pretty good people and you might have liked us if you'd bothered to get to know us. You're the real losers.