Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to Is no one else bothered...

Oh, I am. (Let's all pretend to be surprised.)
Mary Anne — (archived)

But as people will be sure to remind you, I live in a part of the nation with Christian fundamentalists very much in evidence. Pennsylvania is only a blue state because of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and a little part near the Poconos & Scranton.

Yesterday, a parent complained about Jean Shepherd's A Christmas Story, the movie, being located in the children's movie collection, in my department of our public library, because of the implied swearing. No kidding.

We've also had challenges to evolution and to sex education that mentions birth control devices at the 11th grade level (these would be 16- and 17-year-olds). Life can be sooooo interesting when the fundamentalists are around in force. I won't bore everyone again with the stories of Christian bullies in the public schools facing off against my kids and the other two dozen non-Christians.

I understand the part about the price of liberty being eternal vigilance. It's true there is a danger. What's also true is, as long as people keep hollering about it, and acting against it, the danger is less likely to become a reality. So we can't be lazy, and we must be aware.

It doesn't surprise me that TB doesn't see the issue the same way. He lives in a major metropolitan area, rather than the semi-rural suburbs where I live. He doesn't see it as a problem because it hasn't smacked him in the face. He hasn't had to spend several hundred dollars of his own money, nor hundreds of hours on research and organizing expert speaker visits and roundtables, not to mention the strange community vibe that comes from visible activism just to make sure that kids have a chance to hear about the full range of STD prevention measures. He understandably believes I live in a land of the terminally weird. I don't. I live in small-town America. That's what's scary.

What's interesting is that we have another profoundly Christian presence, an Anabaptist influence, whose adherents are deeply opposed to the current Federal Administration's foreign policy, and who are very vocal about it.

Two sides to every coin. Social control or social justice: depends on which kind of Christian you talk to. So I can't say I'm against religion. I'm just against it for me. If all the Christians were content to let me be judged by the God they profess to believe in after I'm dead, we would all be OK.

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