Letter to Pat Toomey - Feb. 4, 2017

Senator Pat Toomey

248 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Senator Toomey,

Donald Trump was elected by the working, disenfranchised middle class. I have a unique perspective because I saw where my Berks- and Leigh-County-based family was in 2008, 2012 and 2016. It’s not what you would think.

My family is evenly divided between Blue Dog Democrats and middle class, Catholic Republicans.  In 2008, nearly everyone voted for Obama. In 2012, a token few went to Romney, but most still had faith that Obama would bring some kind of change to places like Reading and Allentown. In 2016, about half voted for Trump. At least a dozen former Obama supporters who I know intimately voted Trump into office, reaching for the most outlandish option in the hopes that he would “shake up” Washington.

If you want to survive Trump’s four years as a politician, distance yourself from him now. He’s appointing billionaires and deregulating Wall Street, and you’d better believe that we’re paying attention.

On Friday, Trump threatened the fiduciary rule, which protects people like me and my family from self-interested brokers. The fiduciary rule requires that brokers must make decisions in the best interest of their clients, not in the interest of their own portfolios.

We need Dodd-Frank and the Volcker Rule intact, to protect the American people from another runaway financial crisis. We don’t want to bail out the banks with our tax dollars any more.

P.S. Betsy DeVos is still a terrible idea. Come to the right side of history. She’s a terrible idea for Pennsylvania, and the nation. I know because I’ve been doing the work of education – and paying attention to the politics of it – for 15 years longer than she has.

~~~~~

To learn more about how YOU, reader, can fight back against Republican extremism, check out the Indivisible Guide. It was written by Obama White House staffers, and modeled after the ways in which the Tea Party worked against him throughout his Presidency. It's our turn. 

Angels and Miracles for Trump

I just watched John Dickerson's Christmas interview with Stephen Colbert, and it has me thinking about the worldview I derived from my early Catholicism.

Stephen Colbert and I were both raised Catholic, and there's something in our perspectives that matches. We were taught to believe in angels and miracles, so it's possible for us to believe in things we do not understand. We were taught to question and doubt our own thoughts and desires, which allows a way in for radically different perspectives.

Angels and miracles create a space, for me, to imagine my way into my father's psyche, a man I love who thought Donald Trump was the right choice. I can imagine it even though my logical mind resists it. 

"An unquestioned belief is almost vestigial," Colbert says. "It doesn't motivate you in any way...a belief is a filter. You have to run things through it, so you know how you see the world. It's a lens, not a prop."

Trump's election is the last thing I would have wanted for our country. But it has opened an opportunity for me to question and recommit to my beliefs and choices. 

The result? I'm grateful for the meaning I find in my work. I believe more than ever that exercise keeps me sane. I love my friends. Sonia is still my favorite. 

Two things I plan to do differently in 2017: call more Congressmen. Write more everything. 

Amen. 

"This is my daughter, and her partner."

In a long walk through the city on Saturday morning, I listened to Krista Tippett's interview with Mirabai Bush. She spoke about coming to meditation practice in the 1970's.

"I began to see the basic nature of the impermanence of thoughts as they rise and fall away, and I started taking them less seriously," she said. "It gave me a kind of radical self-confidence: that I belonged here on the planet and that I would be able to understand the basics of how it's all unfolding."

I vowed to keep Mirabai Bush's words top of mind as I steeled myself for unpleasant encounters and anxiety at my cousin's wedding later that day. I would recognize them rise in my mind, and watch them fall.

Armed with this reminder, I pulled on the dress Sonia had ordered me from Rent the Runway, and we set off for the suburbs. The Catholic church was pale and drab. There weren't any flowers and the microphones didn't work.

Sonia and I arrived ten minutes late, entered the sanctuary just as the bride and groom reached the altar and sat in the last occupied pew on the left. No one had told the participants how to turn the microphones on. Even my parents, in the fifth row, couldn't hear a word.

When people clapped a second time, we knew it was over. After thirteen years of Catholic school (K-12) going to mass twice a week, I couldn't tell if it had been a full mass.

After the ceremony, something extraordinary and bizarre happened.

The first pews of people began filing out behind the wedding party, followed by the second row of pews and everyone else. My family -- aunts, uncles, a few cousins and finally my parents -- began to pass by the place where Sonia and I stood.

Everyone was smiling, some tentatively. Sonia and I stepped into the aisle and said hello to them, one by one. I said, "This is my partner, Sonia," after I hugged each aunt and uncle, and most of them hugged her, too.

This partner title is an upgrade, for which I'd asked Sonia's permission on the road to the wedding. We made cowboy jokes.

At previous family gatherings, I'd introduced Sonia as my girlfriend. My mother and aunts call their friends "girlfriends" sometimes, so this led to a little confusion or willful ignorance. Partner felt more permanent. They took it in. They seemed to take her in.

We were in a receiving line preceding the actual receiving line. The line backed up, as they do. We slowed and found things to talk about. Sonia bantered with my aunt about a pillow infomercial; my uncle awkwardly mocked the way I'd said "shopping." It was ok.

At the bar at cocktail hour, my dad introduced us to someone he'd been talking to from the other side of the family. "This is my daughter, Rita," he said, "and her partner Sonia."

After seven years, it was finally working.

One drink later, he revealed that he'd given my brother one of the three family time shares and was feeling guilty about it, especially considering I'd paid my own way to college. He fumbled, clearly unplanned, and asked me what he could do to make it up to me.

I swallowed the feeling of being wronged. I don't have a right to my parents' money or possessions, and I cannot control their generosity.

Sonia and I sat at a table with a few other young couples from the city; my parents were on the other side of the room with my aunts and uncles. A few hours into the dancing, I swayed to a slow dance with my dad.

When I announced that we were leaving shortly thereafter, mom pulled dad across the dance floor to say goodbye to Sonia. He kissed her on the cheek as they said goodbye.

I hadn't once consciously used the morning reminder: I am not my thoughts. The reminder itself was sufficient to propel me into the day with confidence and resolve.

And something that hadn't occurred to me as possible actually happened: we had a good time.

Why I Began Watching Transparent (Finally)

I've read a few back issues of Harper's Magazine while watching the still lake waters last week. In the April 2016 issue, a review of Transparent by Emily Witt spoke directly to the world I want to see: a post-religious world in which individuals must come to terms with identity and sexuality (their own and other people's) based on personal, owned values.

That world doesn't look as idyllic as we might hope.

Witt writes, "If Maura is an exemplar of self-actualization -- the person who, after suffering for so long, finally expresses her true self -- her children represent the dark side of a world in which existential decisions are no longer scripted by religious doctrine and social custom but must be discerned through personal exploration."

Maura (Jeffrey Tambour) is the main character, a father of three named Mort when we first meet her. Each of her three children have their own sexual awakenings on the horizon.

Sarah (Amy Landecker), a mother of two, leaves her husband within the first few episodes, to reignite a flame with her college girlfriend. We learn that Josh (Jay Duplass) is still in a relationship with his babysitter from childhood, although the family doesn't seem to know it. Ali (Gaby Hoffman) has an interest in sexual escapades, mostly with men so far, that I suspect serve as a distraction to some deeper desire or knowledge.

While the world without religious doctrine and social custom is still an imaginary future world for me (and most Americans born outside of our major cities), I believe it exists. Seeing Maura's secular children playing out their existential woes in the face of their parent's transition, however, isn't pretty.

Where religious doctrine may condemn and social custom may shame, the secular response seems to be a dive deep into personal neuroses.

Without religion to lean on, I'd hoped their wrestling would be more nuanced, vulnerable and insightful. There's still time for that.

I'll be tuning in for the characters -- they're likable even when they're careless or clueless.

I'll also be tuning in to watch the characters' relationship to religion. The characters are Jewish and there's an emerging rabbi character (Kathryn Hahn), who is present immediately following Josh's discovery of Maura's true identity.

If there's any religion that can overcome the desire to oppress, perhaps it's Judaism. Witt writes, "Now that we are all free to be you and me, [the director] Soloway suggests, perhaps it is worth consulting religion, which may have more than oppression to offer."

I'll try to keep that in mind on Saturday, when Sonia and I will sit through my cousin's Catholic wedding with full mass. It will be the first time I've brought Sonia to a formal event, although she went to a picnic with most of these folks last summer.

The event snuck up on me. We just got back from vacation; there hasn't been time to send off the "We've moved in!" postcards as I'd hoped, so we're going in armed only with one another and the power of repetition.

When I told one of my aunts that my girlfriend, Sonia, and I had moved in a few months back she asked, "Oh, into a two bedroom?" Her voice was hopeful, as though she could still call Sonia my roommate, if only I answered "yes."

"Nope," I replied. "Just a one bedroom. She's my girlfriend."

Such is the power of religious doctrine and social custom. Anything that doesn't fit, does not compute.

My cousin has promised, unsolicited, that we will not be the only gay couple at the wedding. As my brother would say, "If the kids are okay, then the old ones have done enough." Let's hope so.

Isaac Knew Abraham's Plan

My strongest remaining tie to Catholicism is the stories. I love the resonance of Bible stories, especially the story of Abraham and Isaac. They are a part of my mythology, too.

The Abraham and Isaac story resonates with me because it is so utterly horrible and so familiar. My mother has faith like Abraham, for which she would sacrifice anything "of this plane."

In case you're not familiar, the Abraham and Isaac story goes like this. God tells Abraham to bring his eldest son, Isaac, to the top of the mountain, and kill him there like a sacrificial lamb on an altar. Abraham, without a single recorded question in any of the Biblical texts I found, proceeds to the mountain with his son. Abraham carries the knife and the fire (no matches back then), and Isaac carries the wood. You need a lot of wood to burn a recently dead anything. 

It takes the three days to get to the place where God wants Abraham to kill Isaac. Imagine that journey, with Isaac (who I picture as between eight and twelve at the time) asking questions like, "The fire and wood are here, but where is the lamb for burnt offering?"

I understand that Biblical times were different: harsher, with shorter lifespans and perhaps not as much attachment to life, but I still can't give Abraham a free pass. Isaac was his only legitimate son, born to him and Sarah late in life. There was no promise of another. 

Don't even get me started on how, for every Biblical scholar who wants to condemn homosexuality based on the line "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman," there are a dozen twisting themselves in knots to justify or gloss over the use of sex slaves by so-called men of God. Because in fact, Isaac wasn't Abraham's only son. He had a son, Ishmael, by his slave Hagar, who are only mentioned when convenient because of their status as second class citizens.  

Oh. I didn't want to get started. 

Returning to the story, Abraham gets as far as binding Isaac's limbs and laying him on top of the altar, on top of the wood. Do you think Isaac might have picked up on what was happening, offered a little struggle? Could he ever forgive a father who was willing to do that to him? 

There's a streak of masochism in Christianity that repulses me: Abraham the willing victim of God's request, Isaac lying down, mute, on the altar like the sacrificial lamb his father plans him to be. 

I have found the gay Christian blogs (bless their hearts) that work so hard to make the words say what they want. Although I respect the endeavor, for me, it's not different enough than the endeavors of the bigots, using the stale and ancient words to condemn homosexuals, women who've had abortions, or other social pariahs who don't fit with white, middle class values. 

That's what the Christianity that I know has become in America: white, middle class values and self-righteousness disguised as spirituality. In the Evangelical church, there's a little religious ecstasy mixed for a release. 

They need that release. It is a struggle, for many Christians I know, to live their lives contrary to so much actual evidence (the history of the earth, global warming, the nature of evil, you name it). Even gay Christians in progressive and accepting churches have to reconcile with the fact that several branches of their own religion would cast them out. 

Religion is one of the greatest crimes of humanity, compelling generations of victims to live in direct opposition to their own self-interest. 

The greatest victims of religion are those who believe fully, who are willing to sacrifice their children, standing right in front of them, for the promise of an afterlife they haven't seen. 

But of course, we their children are also in trouble. 

Choking on Credal Arguments

Joanna Macy - A Wild Love for the World, an On Being interview with Krista Tippett, stopped me in my tracks yesterday. I stood in the kitchen, frying my mother's zucchini from a too-abundant crop, when I heard Joanna Macy describe becoming devotedly Christian at 16 and how, four years later, everything changed.

"When I went into studies of Biblical history and theology, I began to choke," she said. "I found there was something that I balked at terrifically, which were credal arguments about items of belief, but also any hint of exclusivity, that there were people who were 'beyond the pale.'"

After 13 years of Catholic school (K-12), I left the church by my second year of college. Since that time, I've struggled in my arguments against the Church because I didn't know everything. In Macy's words, I recognized that fallacy. I need not know everything about a religion in order to decide that it doesn't serve my journey.

Senior year of high school, my best male friend, in the moment when I thought he was going to confess his love to me (how many of us have been in that boat), instead came out to me, and made me promise not to tell a soul. We went to the same Catholic school.

Three years later, I learned that a girl I'd known and loved since Kindergarten had had an abortion that same year of high school. Catholic credal arguments against homosexuality and abortion would never trump the innocent struggles of young people I loved, whose high school traumas were linked inextricably to the church calling them sinners in their moments of greatest strife.

According to Catholics, my friends were "beyond the pale." If an institution as powerful as the Catholic church could not offer comfort and support to its own children, honestly trying to navigate the world into which they were born, I didn't want any parts of it.

I've softened in my distaste for the church, the more I've become exposed to its evil stepchild, Evangelism. Where Catholics twist themselves in knots to provide sound reasoning on their credal arguments, Evangelists cater to the same lowest denominator as Fox News. It's all pomp, circumstance and emotionality; they don't even try to develop sound arguments.

My sexuality is intertwined with my spirituality. Both come from love, and from my sense of purpose. About twelve minutes into the interview, Macy talks about falling in love with the Tibetan people because their joie de vivre shone through their hardship so clearly. They are what drew her to Buddhism.

The ever-wise Tippett pointed out how Macy was drawn to the lived experience of the faith before learning more about its tenets.

I want to live my sexuality and life with Sonia in a way that reveals my own joie de vivre, clearly and emphatically, to anyone who is paying attention. It will require more grit and unabashed optimism than I generally wear publicly, but that struggle feels purposeful.

The next step is a picture postcard to the extended family. We'll get a shot on vacation and send it to the extended families and friends, a sort of "We've moved in!" announcement despite the homophobia expressed by several of them.

With the postcard, we'll know officially who's on our team, and the rest of them be damned. At least some part of finding joy in life must be curating the people you choose to have in it.

Vacation begins Saturday!