So today I lost a friend. A friend of 40 years. Someone with whom I roomed in college. We played music together. We were in each other’s weddings and were godmothers to one another’s children. We were both in the same mostly male program of business administration in the early 1980s at a prestigious Jesuit University. We swapped stories of gender discrimination in this program. We would lie around our dorm room and she would say things like, “Well, you know, I would never have an abortion, but I wouldn’t judge any woman who did.”
But something changed through the years. She became more conservative. Not just traditionally conservative, but wacky right-wing conservative. For example, when President Obama was elected, she and her spouse would say that “we aren’t living under the Constitution right now.” But then they would vote for a man, Donald Trump, who proclaimed that the Constitution should be terminated. She goes to the abortion clinics and prays piously out in front of them, judging the poor souls going in there. She became the kind of neo-traditional, pre-Vatican II Catholic conservative that caused her to follow Cardinal Burke and become an anti-vaxxer, an anti-masker, and to maintain that Pope Francis is causing division in the church and that he must answer the “dubia” (fancy Latin word for questions) of two or three ultra-conservative bishops who criticize him. She told me she had done her own research and had her own science about the Covid vaccine and why it might kill you. When my husband recently died of a heart attack, she suggested that he had died because he had gotten the Covid vaccine.
I wondered what happened to the more or less kind and progressive person I used to know. Glenn Beck? Right-wing media? Right-wing Catholic websites such as “The Church Militant?” William Donohue of “The Catholic League”? A kind, loving and fun person with everything to be grateful for had become suspicious, fearful, condemnatory, judgmental and unpleasant. I realized over time that whenever I was with her I was uneasy, if not downright terrified, of the next thing that might come out of her mouth. The arching eyebrow. The snide vocal tones. The Church Lady of SNL coming out to lecture. And I never knew what to say when she would spout her hatred and condemnation of “the libs,” “the Dems,” “abortion,” “the coming socialism,” “Pope Francis,” “women who want to be priests or deacons in the church,” etc.
But this was the final straw: During the Covid quarantine, my young adult family member, Lexi, came out as a trans woman. (See Happy TRANS-giving!) And since my long-time college friend was Lexi’s godmother, after a couple of years of fearfully hiding this fact from her—because she had called trans people “Satanic” and “Demonic”—in light of my husband’s recent death, I decided to just come on out and tell her. I had hoped she could be kind and supportive, empathetic and understanding. I had hoped she would have Lexi’s back, as well as my own. As the Bible of the Catholic Church says, “Kind and merciful, slow to anger, gracious and full of compassion.” Instead, she launched into a tirade against “our evil culture that teaches young people that this is okay.” And then, most shocking of all, she shed a few tears and said, “I’m surprised you didn’t trust me with this information before now!” Yikes! SHE was the victim!
After my spouse’s recent death, she kept coming at me with materials from the very far right-wing of the Catholic Church—the small number of U.S. bishops who are trying to take down Pope Francis, who call him a socialist, who preach animated, articulate, congenial, smiling sermons that condemn—in the cleverest and friendliest way possible—people from the LGBTQ community, women who want to be priests, Pope Francis, and vaguely defined things like “socialism.” I finally grew tired of it and told her not to send that stuff to me.
And...her head exploded. She told me I was a bad parent to simply “rubber stamp” my family member’s gender transition, that we must “love them and accompany them and get them counseling because those gender drugs can harm them” (accompany is Catholic theo-psychobabble for staying on them, trying to convert them back, or rejecting what they are) and she further scolded that it was not loving for me as a parent to affirm my daughter’s new gender. In other words, she judged that I was a very bad parent. She knew nothing of the seven-year journey my spouse and I had walked with our child...the suicide attempts, the cutting and self harm, our child’s withdrawal from life. Our child’s beauty, their decency and tenderness as a human being, their brilliance, their creativity, their value, their worth. She knew nothing of this, and still called me a bad parent for simply deciding to love and accept my child for who and what they are. To accept my daughter for who and what she is.
So, after years of nodding my head politely in terror and fear at her growing religious extremism, I essentially told her to “fuck off.” Specifically, I told her to mete out her anger, hatred and judgment on someone else. I blocked her email and phone. I expected to cry or mourn, but instead, I feel tremendously relieved. She had become a sort of Monster-Shouter for me, and it’s good to be rid of that.
“For a star to be born, there is one thing that must happen. A gaseous nebula must collapse. So collapse. Crumble. This is not your destruction. This is your birth.”