Personal Preference and Common Ground

So much in this world simply comes down to personal preference—maybe religious preference?—and how much society can allow for personal preference, and how much we can all tolerate from one another.

Yesterday I got in a discussion with a friend of mine who told me that the Bible is very clear on homosexuality.  How dare Bishop Tutu compare homophobia with racism or sexism?  And she quoted Leviticus and Paul.  I pointed out that Jesus said nothing about homosexuals.  That didn’t change her viewpoint.

Meanwhile, I continue going over my writing project, trying to understand how it would come across to someone like this friend of mine.  How do you write a story that treats LGBT or poly people with dignity and respect, in a way that this friend could understand?  Is it possible?

Maybe it isn’t.  Then a story about someone who is a minority within a minority within a minority…could never be understood by my friend.  If I speak of Queers, or Polys, or Pagans—or someone who is all three!—is there really no way to bridge the cultural/religious/personal gap between “us” and “them?”

Today, online, I exchanged comments with an Obama-hater.  Same thing.  Vanishingly little common ground.

But our common ground should be our humanity.  How can we “make it so?”

Blessings and Mitzvah/Karma-Points to those who try!

Book Review: The End of the Affair (Warning: Spoilers!)

(From the July South Bay Poly newsletter).

Book “review?”  Or merely a “light once-over?”

I began with enthusiasm.  Graham Greene gets the atmosphere rolling nicely.  World War II.  A man living on one side of the London “commons” has been having an affair with the wife of a “friend” who lives on the other side of the “commons.”  The narrator now thinks the woman is cheating on him, so he convinces the husband to let him hire a private investigator.  The woman often coughs terribly.  I immediately knew she would die of TB or something—and she does.

But in the meantime, she finds God.  She was baptized a Catholic when she was two.  She doesn’t remember, of course.  During an air raid, when the narrator is pinned under a door and appears to be dead, she promises God to reform if God lets him live.  He survives, of course (otherwise he couldn’t be narrating, right?).  Now the woman drops him and considers becoming a Catholic.  The narrator suggests that she has been sleeping around right and left (misogyny, I wondered?).

Now the woman has given up the narrator, and continues to have a “non-marriage” with her husband.  In many years of married life, she has never experienced an orgasm with her husband—though she did, apparently, and often, with the narrator.  But now she can get on with dying (aggravated by the narrator’s tendency to drag her out into freezing rain for gut-wrenching conversations) and becoming a saint.  By the end, she’s probably achieved three bona fide miracles—but not the one she really wanted:  Rather than bringing peace to the narrator, he still feels miserable.  Now if this had been a poly movie (a woman, two men, and God)…

Some people feel that spirituality and sexuality are like East and West—“Never the twain shall meet."  I disagree…  Anyway…I’m off to watch one or both of the film versions next.

Memorial Day, 2012: Contemplating All the Tributes I See to the Military

As a child, in the 1950s and 1960s, I grew up on U. S. military bases.  By the time I was 21, I had lived on (or next to) military bases for...12 or 13 years.  If I count the baby years that I can’t remember, maybe it was 15 or 16 years!  But I wasn't in the military.  My father wasn't in the military.  He worked for the American Red Cross, serving the military.

So I grew up in the military environment, but not actually military, and not a military family. 

The Red Cross is a humanitarian organization.  The military is not.  The international Red Cross movement offers “neutral humanitarian care to the victims of war.”  The American Red Cross offers “support and comfort for military members and their families.”

I grew up as a Protestant Christian.  In military setting, that meant I attended generic church services designed (so I've heard) not to offend any of the many Protestant denominations.  The other choices for church services would have been Catholic or Jewish.  The same chapel was used for all three.

I read the synoptic gospels and believed in loving my enemies and blessing those who cursed me.  Every day, on base, the American flag was raised and lowered as the National Anthem was played.

I knew an Air Force major who disappeared over North Vietnam in the 1960s.  And a military doctor who made mysterious (to me) visits to Iran in the 1970s.  I knew an alcoholic officer.  I knew Red Cross workers:  One who loved classical music.  Another who was a naturalist and had married a Japanese woman after World War II.  I knew the children of the military, the wives and mothers of the military.   I knew the loneliness and the worry of the military.  On the other hand, thanks to the military, I've lived in Germany and Japan, and traveled to over twenty countries.  My family's housing and medical expenses were subsidized.  Food, clothing, and entertainment were subsidized.

It was a very different life.  Growing up, I lived nowhere more than five years.  It was the same for everyone I knew (except for the few scattered years when I was “off-base.”).  I was very connected to the military, but was not military.  I was disconnected, in any deep sense, from the localities in which I was living.

All of this has left me with, shall I say, some "internal conflicts"...