shine in your church, gathered today

The Obama administration believes that contraception should be offered to women as a means of improving public health and women's autonomy. The Catholic church would be violating one of their strongest helded beliefs by offering contraception to its employees and affiliates. (link)

This is the kind of dilemma I face as a Catholic feminist who holds the separation of church and state as an indispensible virtue of government and religion.

I believe that the availability of contraception is directly correlated to the improvement of women's health. I also understand why the Catholic church is against contraception and I fully support their position on denying the use of contraception in the confines of being faithful. No seriously though. I get it. I understand why arguments such as "but contraception use reduces abortion rates" and "but 92% of all Catholic women have used birth control" don't hold an ounce of water against "contraception is against the teaching of the Catholic church".

And yet, the feminist in me is cheering for birth control.

As tomorrow begins the season of Lent, a time of reflection and fasting, and for me the beginning of of my 10th year in the Church, I'm going to be seriously trying to figure out how to reconcile these differences in who I am. Maybe I'll never see an end to this struggle, but it seems to me like I'm unable to keep them as seperate facets of my life and so I keep trying to blend the two as if they could possible exist within one person.

community

Well, last night I had a bit of a breakdown at the Ruby Tuesday. No, it wasn’t over the lack of pasta salad at the salad bar (although that would certainly be a cry-worthy situation) it was over my frustration about my community.

A little backstory: Last night, husband and I attended our local community improvement association meeting. Now, because of a previous life endeavor, I have been to a lot of local community associations. Some are far more productive than others, but they all have one common thread: only old people attend community meetings. Additionally, unless a community is overwhelmingly a majority-minority, only white people attend community meetings. That’s not to say that your community meeting isn’t diverse, or that there aren’t community meetings where lots of young people show up, but after attending literally dozens of these things in a few months time, I can conclude that this is true of more meetings than not. Of course, our community meeting was no different. We were literally the youngest people in the room, and the next youngest were my in-laws. This is no exaggeration. Although my community is easily at least 30% African American and has a very noticeable and young Spanish-speaking population (due to the prevalence of Spanish-speaking church services in the area, or vice versa) every single person at this well-attended community meeting was white.

Without going into too much detail, community members vocalized their opinions on issues of illegal immigration, homelessness and class issues, and the gay community (in reference to the recently failed attempt to pass an equal marriage bill in our state’s legislature.) And then, one of our elected officials told us, with a visible eye-roll, that he was sure the “gay community” would be bringing “it” (the bill) back next year. I’m resisting the urge to say anything negative about this person because while I don’t respect his service to our community, he is a friend and so I’ll leave it at that. But the blatant disregard for who supported this bill was appalling. And don’t you worry, everyone had an opinion, whether it was on their face or on their lips.

All of those opinions were racist, intolerant, hateful, and/or ignorant. None of them were related to actually “improving” the community.

I held back tears looking at the faces of people who are grandmas, grandpas, and respected community elders while realizing that they were completely and unashamedly racist. The place I called home was suddenly completely foreign to me.

It’s at this point that I think most young people interested in change find themselves at a crossroads. You can leave and go somewhere young and vibrant that is accepting and open to their entire community, but only adding to the epidemic that young progressives are moving away, or you can stay and try to change the community around you at the risk of living your whole life in those miserable racist conditions and never seeing any improvement.

And so, I cried.

“All these people are so racist and intolerant. I can’t stand it. It’s offensive to me. I’m not proud to call this place home. I don’t want to live here. We can’t change the community. I’m scared you will turn into one of them. I don’t want to be them. We’re not them. I hate it here.”

Husband generally deals with my sobbing over social issues with a fair amount of tact. He understands why I’m upset, but usually doesn’t quite get why I’d cry over it. But husband has recently been in a pretty good mood, so he tried his best to just humor me and prevent it from turning into a scene the rest of the Ruby Tuesday patrons would tweet about.

Obviously, not everyone in my community is racist or intolerant. And obviously, all communities deal with some element of racism no matter how progressive and accepting they are. And to be fair, old people are generally the ones who show up to these kinds of things because they have the freedom to spend time worrying about their community because they’re not working or taking care of young children. But this larger social issue of communities pushing away young progressives in favor of the status quo is not going to resolve itself if people don’t step up and get involved where they live.

Ultimately, I don’t know what we’ll end up doing, staying to fix it or leaving it behind. Right now, though, we live here, and we do what we can. Last night I didn’t have the courage to speak up, but next time I will. And next time my elected official starts running his mouth about the “gay community”, maybe I will take my husband’s advice and run against him.

finally

Thank you. I've been waiting all week for someone to do this. (link)

My favorite part about this "iconic" image is that according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton she may have just been putting up her hand before a cough due to seasonal allergies. And that, I'm inclined to believe, because if she even thought for a second that it was due to shock, I think she would have said that. And additionally, she is the only person who looks shocked. Everyone else looks like they're watching a late 80's sexual harassment video. I wish there was a photo of great relief on the face of the president at some point. But as many articles have recently pointed out, what's going on in the president's head and what we see on his face are nearly always two different things.