What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?

I was driving Ethan somewhere yesterday (I'm in the car driving so darn much that honestly I can't remember. Yikes!) and the NPR people were talking about Alito, and I was muttering disgruntledly to myself, and Ethan asked me why.

So I explained to him about the whole president-gets-to-pick-whoever-he-wants-for-Supreme-Court-judges-who-might-be-there-for-20-years-after-he-isn't-president-anymore scenario, and since he knows I DESPISE/LOATHE/ABOMINATE George W. Bush with the fire of a fafillion suns, he put the pieces together about my mutterings pretty quickly. Good lad, that.

When I told him this judge, and this court in particular, could substantially affect the world he grows up in, he asked me for specifics. I didn't have enough time to get into the whole abortion discussion (Pro-Choice, in case you're wondering, although I'm pretty sure you could've guessed), so I told him about how pretty soon gay marriage issues will be coming before the court, and about how when one gay person gets really ill, or is in a terrible car wreck or something, Bush and his peeps think it's just fine and dandy that the gay person's partner of no-matter-how-many years, who loves him or her just as much as married male/female couples love each other, wouldn't be able to visit the injured/sick gay person in intensive care or make end-of-life decisions for their loved one.

Ethan thought this was horrible. Because he's a HUMAN BEING, G-DUB.

I also told him about how gay people often adopt children, in states where that's allowed, especially children other couples don't want, but that Bush & Co. don't want gay people to be able to adopt children, or even be parents through any other means.

Again, Ethan, the reasonable and loving human being, was aghast.

I bring this up because I've been thinking about this conversation ever since.

Now, my parents are not the most progressive people on the planet, by any stretch. Sometimes I am embarrassed by their old-fashioned-ness. My mom and dad came from families that, though quite different, were racist as a matter of course. Mom came from old Louisville aristocracy, and her people hired "colored folks" as maids and housekeepers, and to this day I get the willies when I walk in the Pendennis Club and notice afresh that ALL the service staff is black, and ALL the members are white. Dad came from farm folk in the tiny, poor, white town of Bargersville, Indiana. Grandpa died before I was born, but Grandma was afraid of black people, and certainly didn't trust them to take care of her in her later years. And gay people? What are those?

So it's rather remarkable that my parents, coming from that background, and religious in only the most unobtrusive, laid-back Methodist sort of way, managed to raise me as someone who doesn't have a racist or anti-gay bone in my body. I think that my mom, as an educator, came into contact with many different types of children, and was just too kind to parcel them out into limiting categories in her own mind. (She still calls gay men "fairies," which I think is hilarious, but she loves the entertainment industry far too much to harbor any ill-will towards them.)

Ever since I had this conversation with Ethan, I've been trying to imagine what those uber-religious, right-wing nutbars say to their children. How do you phrase hate and fear and package it for the consumption of small children, who are, for the most part, predisposed to care for their fellow humans?

"Gay people are SINNERS, Keight-lynne. They will BURN IN HELL and you must shun them. Especially you, Jebediah!"

"Listen here, Heaven-Lee, you git away from them two wimmen. Them's nasty, and don'tchew EVER let me citch yew talkin' to that there daughter they got thar, or I'll wear outchor butt with mah belt! They'll gitchew, and then yull be sorry. "

"When girls wear pants, God gets a tummy ache!" (Actually said to my husband's sister when she was little. Sometimes Indiana is just embarrassing, yo.)

I'm so proud I have a compassionate, empathetic child. I take quite seriously the responsibility of enlarging his scope of understanding, and pointing his moral compass in the right direction. I cannot even IMAGINE teaching him to hate or fear someone because of their ethnicity, culture, sex, sexual identity, or anything else.*

There's enough ignorance and lunacy in this world.

There's a quote from Dickens that I have had framed, and that I have looked at every day since I had Ethan.

"It is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us."

My brother asked me about it recently, because he knows I don't believe in that "God." I explained that, to me, what it's really saying is that children start out so pure and so full of unadulterated love, that when they love us, they love us for our truest selves, and that is SO incredibly redeeming and powerful to me. Ethan, in a way, saved me. By loving me for my SELF, he taught me that I was worth something.

We should extend that, I think. Children love. They don't know, and don't need to know, any of the other crap that attaches itself and constitutues conditions and caveats to that love as we grow older. They just love, and that love is beautiful.

Why would anyone EVER corrupt that? Adults could really learn from children, if we'd open our damn eyes and our hearts. Imagine if we all loved each other in that redeeming way.

Just imagine.



*except G-Dub. But he's an exceptional case, truly. His idiocy is his own fault. And it's ok to hate willful moronitude. It IS! This does not detract from my message of peace and love in any way.