I was starting to feel straight guilt until I remembered that the anti-gay marriage referendum goes hand-in-hand with the ambition to conscript my womb — and after abortion is illegal, what about contraceptives? If society isn’t ready to ban contraception a la Catholic doctrine, we could certainly see health plans dropping it from their coverage. And as someone who has paid $30-40 a month for the pill when I was making $7/hour as a bookstore clerk, I recognize it as a tax on women.
Anyway, I got a physical reaction to the election—my eyes flared with conjunctivitis on Wednesday and Thursday. It’s going away now. But it felt like stigmata.
I wish I could do justice to my anger and your despair, Maggie, without sounding like a condescending liberal. But I am a condescending liberal. I think religion closes down the mind. I think reading the Bible when you could be reading Melville, Whitman, Stevens, et al., is just nonsensical. I think arguing for Creationism when science is full of fascinating facts and theories, is retarded. Didn’t the Greeks have a word to describe the pleasure of intellectual discovery or reason? (Homework question.)
For the record, my evangelical in-laws feel just as persecuted and oppressed as we do. That’s the irony. Remember all those rightwingnuts who actually object to the Patriot Act on the grounds that “the Christians are next”? I’m sure I do my part to foment these fears when I visit with the only grandchild that won’t grow up some kind of Christian. And we’re the only ones who live in NYC and the only ones who went to the Ivy League ... well, color me a demographic cliche! But I’m not making nice. I’m a poet; the future of my art depends on there being people who get intellectual pleasure from words and ideas that aren’t God-centered. I need to feel that there will be a future constituency for Melville and Dickinson, the difficult ones, the outsiders and the ones railing at God with their fists shaking at Heaven, or alternately, “this dividing and indifferent blue.” You know. The sky, repository of all ineffable ideals.
So, I repeat: I’m not making nice.
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2 comments:
Dear Ange & Maggie
Discovered "minor american" just recently by following a link to another link and then...here i am. And thank you. I've been inspired to get my hands on "Desires of Mothers..." & hope for a slice of time, soon, to read it.
As for the post-election blues: got them big time. And what depresses me even more is that out of my several relatives in Ohio who voted, only two of them voted for Kerry. And the others bought into the "moral values" crap. Having lived my whole life in California (O.K., 2 years in Iowa City while my husband was in grad school...but that's a pretty liberal island w/in Iowa) i think sometimes i forget that there are vast portions of the country who hate/fear anyone or anything outside of their narrow white-christian universe. I was so excited when my friends Jess & Gwen got married at City Hall in SF in February, I really thought maybe this is a turning point in the culture, that it could spark something larger...and as we know now, it did. A backlash of epic proportion.
I have to admit i am a bit annoyed by a lot of the "well i'm leaving the country now" talk... gee, that would be nice but those of us w/low paying jobs/children/no trust fund, really, that isn't an option. So now what? Shall all us liberals move to swing states by 2008 to sway the next election? Would it even be enough??
Feeling like an endangered species,
kh
Ange,
I have to say I think Creationism and all the other Christian stuff is pernicious. I don't think I could openly respect a fundamentalist view even for the sake of peace. But what the numbers show is that there is a very large minority in the red states that have more sense than that. And there's an interesting op-ed piece in The Times today that says the numbers show that the moral issues didn't have that much to do with the victory. Sometimes I think that this administration's popularity amounts to nothing but the fact that so many people think that W is just like them.
-- Maggie
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