This isn't the first friendship I've sunk, nor even the first friendship of long standing. (Though interestingly enough, this time it's the only other person I mention in that Breadbin entry.)
It hurt to dump Jen. It damn near kills to dump Darlene.
I've written about Darlene before...twice. Which is nothing to the number of times I wrote about her in 1988 and '89, let me tell you. Her name appears in my diary an average of more than once a day over those two years. (No, I wasn't a stalker...just a sad, forlorn, lovesick teenager.) The friendship spiked in the summer of '89, trembling on the knife-edge of becoming something much deeper, then settled down into a low drone. I lost contact with her for a few years, eventually found her again on Facebook, and picked up the threads as if they'd never dropped. She was my first love, and it does not detract from my love for my wife one iota to say I never stopped loving her. Still do, in fact, which is why this hurts so much.
I've tried to make allowances for her devout Christianity, just as she has no doubt made allowances for my heathenism. (Wow, that's a word.) We've had our friction points and invariably we've stepped back and agreed to disagree. Our politics don't mesh well, either, but I think that's related: when you get that deep into a faith, it informs -- some would say infects -- everything you believe. This is called fundamentalism, and whether the single track leads to Allah, Jesus, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it's abhorrent.
So today, I learned -- from Darlene -- about this exhibit at the Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa. She was predictably disgusted: God forbid kids learn about healthy sexuality. I mean that literally: apparently her God forbids it. She reproduced this letter sent to the government from something called the "Institute for Marriage and Family Canada" complaining about the exhibit. (I'm always on edge as soon as organizations like this make an appearance: their definition of "family" and mine don't match. Here they are upset that kids as young as twelve might see (gasp) s-e-x. One wonders what planet these people are living on. It certainly isn't mine.
Montreal isn't on that planet, either. When the exhibit showed there, there wasn't a single complaint.
The first boner of contention (sorry, can't help myself) had to do with the supposed lack of abstinence teaching. Well, there's two good reasons for that. The first is that this is an exhibition called "Sex". Have you ever seen a math class without numbers?
The second reason is much more telling to the fundamentalist frame of mind. ABSTINENCE 'SEXUAL EDUCATION DOES NOT WORK. Not if your objective is fewer teen pregnancies and fewer abortions. If your objective is following Scripture in total ignorance of its effects in the world, well, knock yourself out. All I ask is that you either admit you're being willfully blind, or that you actually do want more teenage pregnancies and more abortions.
I could cite study after study showing that, for instance, in places like the Netherlands where exhibitions like this might not have age limits at all, teen pregnancy is virtually unheard of. Comprehensive sex ed there starts in kindergarten.
No matter how many studies I cite, Scripture would trump all. I can't help getting angry at that. It reminds me far too much of our wilfully ignorant federal government. "Don't bother with alternate points of view and seriously, don't bother with facts to support them. We're Conservatives and fundamentalists. We don't listen and we don't care."
Or as she said: "There is no Christian education in this exhibit at all." I couldn't help thinking of the book burners who got rid of everything except the Bible on the grounds that no other book was necessary.
That passage pushed me right to the edge. What tipped me over was her insistence that homosexuality is "not okay", is "abnormal", is "not right". That "God did not design the human body to have sex other than the 'normal' way". One man, one woman.
Hey, there's nothing wrong with one man, one woman. That's my marriage, and it's a great one.
But I have friends and relatives who are gay. How can I be friends, on any level, with someone who thinks these loved ones of mine are "abnormal" and "not right"?
What if it had been me? I would have lost out on what was, at one point, a pretty solid friendship.
What if it had been her? I asked her that tonight. I'm very interested to hear the answer to that. It's the only thing that kept me from outright unfriending her.
Doubtless I will miss countless Christian nuances here. I'm no longer capable of parsing the simplest Christian sentence. I can't read "love the sinner and hate the sin", for example, without seeing "hate the sinner" instead. When the "sin" is something intrinsic to your very nature such as your sexual orientation....Have you ever heard that song that goes "it's you I love, not the thought of you"? I always thought those were the stupidest lyrics I ever heard in my life: I love you so much, but every time I think of you, I puke.
Hey, there's nothing wrong with one man, one woman. That's my marriage, and it's a great one.
But I have friends and relatives who are gay. How can I be friends, on any level, with someone who thinks these loved ones of mine are "abnormal" and "not right"?
What if it had been me? I would have lost out on what was, at one point, a pretty solid friendship.
What if it had been her? I asked her that tonight. I'm very interested to hear the answer to that. It's the only thing that kept me from outright unfriending her.
Doubtless I will miss countless Christian nuances here. I'm no longer capable of parsing the simplest Christian sentence. I can't read "love the sinner and hate the sin", for example, without seeing "hate the sinner" instead. When the "sin" is something intrinsic to your very nature such as your sexual orientation....Have you ever heard that song that goes "it's you I love, not the thought of you"? I always thought those were the stupidest lyrics I ever heard in my life: I love you so much, but every time I think of you, I puke.
Well, that's "love the gay person, hate the fag" for you. It's also, oddly enough, very apt to describe how I feel about dear friends with hateful attitudes.
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