(Wow. I didn’t plan on taking the week off. I guess with Master away, there wasn’t much to talk about. He’s home, got in last night, and is leaving again Monday for two weeks (sad face). But hopefully, this wraps up the expected travel for awhile. Although, the economy… bah… we gotta do what we gotta do, right?)
Anyway, I had an interesting conversation with my mother the other day. My mom is having a crisis of faith these last couple of years. She’s 66, but it’s never too late to be enlightened in my opinion.
My mother is a staunch Republican, quite conservative and rather closed-minded. She might think that woman’s lib was the beginning of the breakdown of our Norman Rockwell society, though I’m not sure she’d ever come right out and say so. She certainly believes a woman’s place is at home, happily procreating in God’s image and cooking meatloaf on Tuesday night. An ex-Sunday school teacher, but not of the sweetness and light, God loves everybody type – more the hellfire and brimstone, we’re all doomed to eternal damnation type.
Her views, especially on sexuality, are prim and proper, prudish really. Masturbation is a disgusting sin earning you a one-way ticket to Hell. People who buy sex toys or watch pornos are “sick” and “have something wrong in their heads”. In fact, the reason she filed for divorce from my bio-dad is because he had “weird sex ideas” and he wanted to “swap partners!” (and here she literally shudders in revulsion).
Needless to say, I’m an atheist. Something my mom and I don’t talk about very often. It’s no surprise to me, as “weird and sick” as I am, that I choose not to believe such a God exists.
Okay, so, I think I’ve painted an accurate picture of my mother. My mom and I have had our moments and our heartaches, but the last couple of years have been good and we have come to a place where we can get along and almost become friends. I don’t want to paint her in an all bad light, because she’s really just a product of her generation and had no reason to ever question it.
One strongly held view that both she and my dad (step-dad, but he raised me so he’s dad to me) had was on homosexuality. My mother condemned it based on religious beliefs, my dad – well, he just thinks it’s gross.
My dad (also Republican) is a Harley-lovin’, beer-drinkin’, Vietnam-hardened ex-Marine. Patriotic, good old American apple pie, keep your homos, fags, and the little woman outta my military kinda guy.
Once, and only once, I argued with my dad over his view on gays in the military. I’d had just enough to drink that my brass balls were swinging, and he’d had just enough to drink that he was almost mellow. He made the claim that when he was in combat and he was ducked down in a trench with bullets zinging over his head and his life depended on the man next to him, the last thing he wanted was some “limp-wristed, panty-wearing fruit snivelling in the dirt”. (his words, not mine)
I suggested that not all gays were “fruit”, nor did they wear panties and “snivel” and that, probably, in fact, very very probably, one or more of the men in that trench with him were homosexuals. He slammed his beer on the table, told me that he knew all the fucking Marines he was with and not one of them were “fucking fags”.
Well. I shut up then, because, I dunno, I guess I figure you can’t force change on people. It has to come from within. Which brings me, finally, to the meat of the post.
My mother and her crisis of faith. About 6 years ago, maybe 7, my mother’s youngest brother died. It was very much unexpected. In the years just prior to his passing, he and my mother had become quite close.
He was a bachelor, always just saying that he hadn’t found the right girl. And then he died, and the real reason for his bachelorhood came out. He was gay. In fact, he was in a very serious relationship with a man that nobody in the family knew existed. And thus began my mother’s crisis.
Were she to continue believing as she had always believed, her baby brother was in Hell for committing the unforgivable sin of being a homosexual. I think it was very easy for her to condemn strangers to that fate when she knew nothing about them. But to think of the goodness and sweetness that lived within her brother, to think that he was eternally damned merely for loving a man, this someone that she knew and loved… it wasn’t sitting well at all.
My dad, on the other hand, neatly, and with irrational finality, categorized it. Fags were still fags, but Uncle Harry was just Harry. How that makes sense to him I haven’t a clue, but it does.
Now we enter my daughter, the lesbian. Probably, I should send up an offering of thanks to Uncle Harry for paving Am’s way with my parents.
My mom, once again, is faced with either having to condemn her granddaughter to an eternity of hell or to re-examine that which she’s believed her entire life. My mom, of course, loves Am to pieces. So does my dad, and once again, he’s seperating Am from the “rest of the queers”.
For the record, I love my parents very much. I have a deep appreciation for everything they have done in their lives and how they’ve sacrificed for us. I can love them and vehemently disagree with them. And I do.
So, I was talking to my mom on the phone and the conversation turned to religion and homosexuality. I asked her how she was reconciling Am’s sexual preference with her religious beliefs. She asked me if I was *sure* Am was a lesbian? I told her that it really wasn’t my call to make, but that Am seemed pretty sure of it. She then suggested that maybe homosexuality was just one of those sins that people were going to have ask forgiveness for – like telling lies and stealing cookies.
I just laughed.
She then mentioned that she’d heard somewhere that scientists had isolated the gene that caused gayness! She said that just like Down’s syndrome, homosexuality came from an extra chromosome. A cure could be on the horizon, you know.
(I don’t know where my mom gets her information, and I no longer ask. When I talk to my mom, we have an unspoken agreement. She doesn’t question me too hard about my lifestyle choices and I don’t argue too much with her off-the-wall “I read this in a magazine” beliefs. It’s easier on us both to just carry on with the base idea of what she’s said. So ignore with me the fact or fiction of extra chromosomes, or what “causes” homosexuality, okay? It’s hard, I know.)
She asked me if I could go back in time to Am’s creation and if scientists could have tested her in the womb and known she had the “gay gene” but that they could “fix” it, would I have done so?
I didn’t brush it off as a stupid question because it’s really NOT a stupid question. Every parent wants their child’s life to be perfect and easy. Do I think homosexuality is easy? No. There is still discrimination, there is still hatred and bigotry. Am cried after election day. “It’s like one step forward and two steps backward.” she said. “We’ve elected a black man for president, but we ban gay marriages. Why?”
And what answer is there? Why? I don’t know why. And when I look at the bigotry still alive and well and I know my daughter is the target of that, would I elect to avoid that for her? That is not a stupid question, and not an easy answer.
But I’m not at that point in time. I’m not pregnant with an unknown person. What I have now IS a person. A delightful, beautiful whole person. I cannot, even in theory, pretend I don’t have that. She is who and what she is, and every part of her and every experience she has had is what has shaped her into this person.
Would I take the “gay cure” at the moment of conception? I don’t know. Would I go back in time and do it and take the chance of altering the daughter I have now? No. Not in a million years. She is perfect exactly as she is, in my eyes.
That was my answer for my mother’s question. She agreed, with a very quiet admission that that’s true.
I asked her if she thought Am was defective in some way.
Of course not, she said, not at all. What an awful thought that is.
Yet you’re saying, Mom, that homosexuality is a birth defect, like Down’s syndrome.
Well, yes, she agreed with that.
But, I said, if you believe that God is the creator of human life, then isn’t it your God who created Am exactly as she is? Does your God make mistakes?
No. No no no. God doesn’t make mistakes. Of that she’s sure.
*sigh*
I think she’s struggling with what kind of God to believe in. I can only imagine the turmoil she’s in, 60+ years of deeply held beliefs, a world and a life that was wrapped up in a neat little package with reasonable (to her) explanations for the wrongness in it.
It’s hard to say what conclusions she’ll come to. I know that she’ll never, ever condemn her granddaughter to an eternity in Hell.
Am has pulled away from the church she was enjoying because of an overheard conversation between two church members about homosexuality. One minute she’s gushing about the church and the youth group, how she honestly believed that there was a reason for everything and the reason we had to move here was so she could grow spiritually in this new-found church that she really felt a connection to — and the next minute she just didn’t want to go, couldn’t go, isn’t ready to face the judgement.
The two of them, my mother and my daughter, both in their own crisis of faith. My mother struggling to accept a God who just may embrace homosexuality, my daughter struggling with the idea of a God who condemns it, who condemns her.
I will give you peace and quietness.
– I Chronicles 16:11
Any day now, God. Any day.
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Uncategorized | kaya | 
Thursday November 13th, 2008 10:00am | 
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