Dear American Social Conservatives,
To begin: people who believe that there should not be separation between church and state terrify me on a visceral level. There is a very good reason for this, and it comes down to simple self-preservation.
I am a religious minority, in that I have no religion, and have never been a convert away from or toward any set of religious beliefs, really. I was raised without religion, and frankly I have a bit of a mental block when it comes to faith in an all-knowing or benevolent deity. I have never known what that belief was like. I feel no sense of loss, no sense of “something missing” the way a number of christians seem to presume I should. I am content to be completely irreligious.
I am atheist. Hear me not being a dick about it. (My apologies if your experiences with other atheists have been of a different sort; those fuckers who had a chunk of cross-shaped rubble removed from the site of the collapsed twin towers are kind of tactless fuckwits, I freely admit.)
I am also celibate, I don’t do any illegal drugs, I’m sane, intelligent, relatively polite, have never been convicted of a crime (unless you count a couple of speeding tickets) and I even pay my taxes.
By the way: I’m also bisexual. Reeeally bisexual. I am not confused, I am not “experimenting”, and I am not “just promiscuous” (re: celibate, by choice). Nor am I “just desperate.” I’m female and I live in a university town: getting laid around here isn’t exactly tricky. I could hit 6th street on a saturday night, find a suitably drunk frat boy, and have done with it––if the idea didn’t disgust me utterly.
I love women, I love their bodies and their voices and their minds. I love men, in all the same ways. I am, however, a logical and sane creature, as much as any 21-year-old human can claim (debatable, I know.) If I am going to share myself with another human being, it’s going to be because they can keep up with me mentally and hold my interest. If I find someone like that, it won’t make me permanently specific to whichever gender that person turns out to be: I will still find women and men equally attractive, physically. Whether I devote myself to any one of them is another matter entirely.
Just letting you know: there are people like me out there. We’re not scary: I have a day job in tech support, and raise no comment with my preferences or my behavior. I’m good at my job, and a reliable, relatively moral human being. I am not threatening, really, so far as I can tell. I don’t go around spouting anti-religious ideology. I don’t generally discuss religion with people who aren’t among my close friends, unless someone else brings it up first; even then, I say little more than “I’m not religious” if I’m being careful or “I’m atheist” if I’m being blunt.
And because the company I work for doesn’t have a real HR department, I overhear snippets of conversation daily which offend my own personal ideology (I can have an ideology without a god; if you don’t believe me, please google ‘secular humanism’ and come back when you’ve finished reading the wiki page.) My boss and one of my co-workers were discussing how my country should waterboard prisoners and how gays aren’t real Americans. They don’t do this in front of me (since I’m not what you’d call closeted, and rednecks being rednecks the only “real gays” are homosexual men ahur-hur-hur) but given I’m a known liberal, the liberal white males among my co-workers entrust me with their unease and complaints. We can’t say a damn thing about it, either; this is still Texas, and I’m not a high-demand quantity in the working world. I am the job-market equivalent of an idiot-savant: a talented and intelligent “unskilled” worker bee. People like me (insofar as job skills) are all over this town, and I’m sure several of them would be happy to take my place, and earn the pay I’m making, which barely keeps me afloat month to month. Chalk that up under “reasons I don’t have my real name connected to this blog.” Yes, I’m a coward, but I also have to pay rent. Side note: the moment I detect any harassment of anyone openly GLBTi in my workplace, myself included, my employers will see a side of me that I daresay might shock them.
I know that in my state (if not my entire country) people like my boss and coworker greatly outnumber people like me. I am outnumbered. Democracy is, quite frankly, against me. Then again, those who really and truly believe that there should be a war against the separation of church and state, I think, may be almost as small a group.
Apparently, rhetoric in favor of that secularism frightens these people. This speech from John F. Kenney, for instance:
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President – should he be Catholic — how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him.
That idea frightens the far-right conservatives in America, Rick Santorum among them.
They believe in an America where the separation of church and state serves the purposes of those who support… what? Rick Santorum is Catholic; does he want the government to be preferential toward Catholics? Or does he mean Christians as a whole? Well, that’s an interesting can of worms. Ask a staunch Protestant whether any of the following groups are really Christian: Mormons, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Greek Orthodox, or Jehovah’s Witnesses.
They believe in an America that says it believes in whatever god will support their political platform. Since apparently Barak Obama’s god doesn’t support that platform, clearly the president has, according to Rick Santorum, a “Phony Theology” of some sort.
Can I get a bit of emphasis on that? They believe in an America without all that troublesome separation between church and state. All of that tiresome red tape which prevents them from dictating to the American public how they should lead their lives morally and spiritually. They believe in it, this one nation OF their god, and of their holy book, which they claim is the only word to fully trust. Many of them even believe that the only understanding of the bible is to be wholly literal.
I, frankly, am not from that country.
I am from a country that eats shellfish instead of believing every single word of Leviticus; I am from a country that has Cajun food, and New England clam bakes, and Maine lobster. What’s more American than that?
I am from a country that believes it’s not a great idea for the church to control the government, because in past history on the other side of the Atlantic, that really didn’t work out too well. The renaissance popes got away with decadence that the latter days of the Roman empire could never have dreamed of. The crusades were a cascade of horrors and brutality that christians may never be fully forgiven for in the middle east. Puritans in England were burned up like Nero’s christian human-torches because of their beliefs, and people keep trying to claim they founded the United States of America in some way (gross oversimplification though that may be). Oliver Cromwell, also a puritan, did things to the Irish that no “holy” purpose could possibly excuse.
So pardon me if I don’t want a country wherein the state is not separate from religion. The state alone gets us into enough trouble when the purely-religious motives of its movers and shakers are supposedly “leashed” by that separation. Look at the wars we’ve started, for fuck’s sake! Look at our unbridled pretension, the unspoken suggestion that the people over there in Iraq and Afghanistan can’t take care of themselves, and need whitey imperialist “liberators” to teach them how it’s done.
Screw the “new Roman empire” concept; we’ve landed smack dab in a tar bit of old victorian White Man’s Burden. And the stains will not come out.
“We will be greeted as liberators.” Out! Out damned spot!
If my whiteness comes with a burden, it’s that anywhere in the world I go, and people hear me speak with my American accent––plain as day to any human being who has watched television for a few hours, it seems––a great deal of people will have that impression in the back of their head: “You think I will greet you as a liberator. You think that the way I have lived my life is not good enough, is not christian enough. You believe that your people and your ways are superior, without even bothering to try and understand our ways, despite having most of the world’s resources and thus surely enough opportunity to learn about nearly anything you wish. You are an American, and therefore an asshole.”
It will be like that for me around the world: France, Serbia, Turkey, Iran, India, Pakistan, China, Thailand, Haiti, the Philippines, Chile, Belize, and many, many more! Not all of them will think this, but most of them will at the very least bear it in mind, and handle me with caution, waiting for the other foot to drop.
And I. Cannot. Blame them.
I have spent most of my life ignorant, under the impression I was closer to upper-class and its privileges than was actually the case, mainly due to the nature of the secular home and a relatively liberal education. Then I hit 18 and suddenly the higher education I’d been promised by my parents was revealed to be something of a pipe-dream. I’d been told not to worry, and the idea that maybe I’d need to pursue scholarships and actually work harder was never really presented except as something distant, and abstract.
When it all fell apart, I could only blame myself for being quite so blind, and so willing to believe it would be effortless while around me my more ambitious friends worked rather harder.
I have no sympathy for those with more privilege, for whom that was not a pipe-dream, but who still never had to work for their gains. They leave home, and find that the world is a harsh place, indeed. Many of them earn degrees for pleasure, with no career path, and no major goals. Then they wind up in jobs that pay less then mine. I’m not gleefully amused by it in most cases. I just want to issue them a sober, “welcome to my world.”
I’m digressing. A lot.
Back to the point: I’m a flamingly bisexual, intellectual liberal atheist, with the thinnest of libertarian streaks strongly curtailed by my personal experiences with how stupid, violent and nasty people can be when left strictly to their own devices. I’m a minority, I’m not demanding anything (except perhaps tact and a bit of tolerance) and I’m feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the political discourse in what is, for now, my country.
My message to conservative America: all I want is to be treated like a human being, given the right to love whoever I want for the rest of my life without the government declaring that that love means infinitely less if I happen to spend thirty, forty, or fifty years in a monogamous and loving relationship with a woman instead of a man, and maybe to be considered––as a human, and a U.S. citizen, and a functional member of society––of equal value compared to the super-rich and super-successful who currently get tax breaks I can scarcely fathom the full extent of.
If you believe in an America where “Gays Are Not Real Americans,” and “Waterboarding Is Good,” and “Obama’s Religion is Phony But Mine Is Super-Awesome And All Americans Should Never Say Anything Bad About It And Bend To My Church’s Every Whim”: I say that your America is pipe-dream. Sorry, darlings, but it’s a great big country here, and Christianity isn’t the only game in town anymore.
This country has Muslims, Buddhists, Agnostics, Non-Denominational folk of various sorts, Freemasons, Hindus, Hippies who “aren’t religious, but they’re spiritual”, Secular Humanists, Neo-Pagans, Satanists-Who-Don’t-Hurt-Anybody-Surprisingly, Rastafarians, Pastafarians, Reformed Pastafarians, people who worship aliens, and even a few of us wild and crazy Atheists.
And without all of us, you are nothing.
I am from a country where people don’t regularly vilify Jews. I am from a country where the white people, outside of the coastal regions, really aren’t very good at cooking real food that has flavor. I am from a country wherein I could be raised without religion, and not be barred from success in any career field because of it (in theory). I am from a country where a sorta-agnostic hippie college dropout with no real religion could be come a pop-culture cult icon and one of the richest men in the world. I am from a country where there is a free press capable of holding politicians and other major public figures accountable for their actions, their mistakes, and their inconsistencies. I am from a country that does not peek into the neighbor’s bedroom to accuse them of ungodly sexual acts when two legally consenting adults are the only ones involved in it. I am from a country that has a separation between church and state because it’s a sound, rational, and sensible principal which encourages people of differing religions and perspectives to respect each other’s differences instead of vilifying and attacking them!
At least, I hope I am. I want to love my country, I do, but what will I be left with if the tide turns––and with it, my country itself turns––against me?
I do not know. Truly, I do not know.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT:
I am a font of useless information, and random quotes. Here is one of the latter:
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb…”
– Benjamin Franklin, who was some kind of an important figure in American history.
Yeah. I always feel using quotes from “the Founding Fathers™” is a bit of a cop-out.
(Ben Franklin also liked orgies. A lot. Just sayin’.)
Now that I’ve been polite, I’d also like to mention that this is the only reason I knew who Rick Santorum was, when I heard he was running for president.
Have a nice day.
