I'M GOING TO NETROOTS NATION!

Good news/bad news. Mostly good.

I did NOT get a Netroots Nation scholarship, despite receiving 45 votes and being somewhere in the top 10-15 votegetters (from a field of 30 scholarships awarded).

However, the support I received from ya'll simply blew me away. The things you said about me, the folks who turned out to stump for me -- it was jolting and made me take another assessment of myself. All in the most positive way.

And: I'm still going to Netroots Nation.

How? Because Jesse Wendel and the Robinsons (Sara and Evan) have come forward to pay my way. This includes the conference fee, which was offered a reduced rate by Democracy for America (THANKS, DFA!), rental of a power wheelchair for four days, transportation to and from the conference site, and all my meals. It's a done deal. I'm going.

Which means more than I can ever know, much less express. But I'll try, nonetheless.

When I began my own blog, I became interested on a whole other level in what other bloggers were doing. I became a critical consumer of writing, thinking, and strategy as it is presented on the web. I was looking for people who knew how to express themselves without negativity or denial, who researched and made deep connections, who believed in the goodness of humanity and allowed that to come through even when they were reporting on our worst behavior, and who were capable of addressing multiple (all) issues simultaneously. I wanted to read the thoughts of someone who meant to change the world but not from an ego-driven perspective.

Eventually, I found Orcinus and Sara Robinson. Every time I read one of her essays, I felt bells go off inside my head and I wanted to call all my friends, say "You GOTTA hear this". She invariably took on the fear and distortion present in fundamentalism and this country's Right with calm, intelligent, bold clarity. She wrote and thought better than I did. (I don't suffer from false modesty, just to be frank, here.)

Finally, I wrote her a fan letter. She, in her deliberate way, checked me out and passed on the information to her colleague at Group News Blog, Jesse Wendel, who also began checking me out.

All I can say is, thank g*d I didn't throw up a post about how scared I am of alien abduction or Sasquatch. (Just kidding.) (Kinda.)

At any rate, after a while Jesse came after me. See, Jesse is someone who has put in the time to sort through his male conditioning, deciding what makes sense to retain and what is counter to his best interests. He's figured out that being direct and assuming responsibility are admirable human traits, when scraped clean of self-righteousness, gender myths, and power grabs. It's a relief to be around in any form, male or female.

And I, on my part, have put in the time to sort through my working class conditioning, weeding out my fear of exploitation and distrust of my instincts. So, when he came after me, I said "Sure, let's talk." When a powerful equal approaches you and offers to work in tandem, you have everything to gain by saying yes.

I've had nothing but growth and increasing liking since. Don't underestimate liking; at my age, I think it's the most important outrigger of love, along with respect.

So, these folks are building a bridge from me to who knows what. (In an almost literal since: The route from my apartment to the convention site is almost a straight shot down Congress Avenue across the Ann Richards Bridge, as good a symbol as my poet heart could wish for.)

Please send them your thanks, your energy, your attention. Their writing and works are making an untold difference out there, as well as in my life.

And, heartened by this possibility, this turn of events, I've finally taken the step to add a Pay Pal button to my website. I can now accept donations. I'm not a tax-deductible entity, just needy. If you do make a donation, please tell me who you are and let me thank you directly.

Thanks for reading this far. You'll be hearing a lot more from me about this conference in the coming month. Summer is now officially launched, and so am I.

Love, Maggie

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MUDDIED WATERS: BLOG AGAINST THEOCRACY

Friends, I am participating in this weekend's Blog Against Theocracy event in the blogosphere. If you click on the link, you'll find a list of all the other blogs who are likewise participating, and discover some very fine reading, I'm sure. I'll be keeping my post on this at the top of my site all weekend, despite posting other essays later.

**************

When I was thirteen years old, I became an atheist. I was definitely not pressured into this decision. My father's parents were fundamentalist Baptists -- Bible Baptists, as they are known in that part of Oklahoma. My father was not quite as vehement as them, but definitely carried their DNA. Mama had become a convert to Hinduism and the teachings of Edgar Caycee after our return from India, which certainly made her unique in the small Texas and Louisiana towns where we lived, but she was not an atheist. I had been pursued by the local Baptist Church in one town, where I prayed, learned missionary skills, and attended revivals.

Until I changed my mind. It was an honest comfort to give up on g*d and accept I was alone with things. Alone with all of humanity and nature and history, which was plenty. I had to keep my atheism secret, of course, except from my mother who was astonished but not upset with me.


(Easter 1967, Dilley, Texas: Maggie, age 11, and her little brother Bill, age 8)

As my adolescence progressed, so did my social conscience. By the time I was 20 and an official bleeding heart revolutionary, my ethics and morality were at fever pitch. I explored and became comfortable with other spiritualities -- wicca, Judaism, Buddhism, the Society of Friends -- but as cultures, without an accompanying belief in g*d. I liked being an atheist. It gave me freedom, especially of the mind.

Things began changing, again without an outside influence I can trace, when I was in my early 40s. I began, slowly, to have creeping tendrils of what, for lack of a better word, I called faith. Faith in something immense, unknowable, which loved me (in an abstract way) and all the universe, something which was the universe and yet also distinguishable from it. At that point in my life, I had a good job, a strong community, my health and a sense of hope. I didn't need g*d, but there she appeared.

I was enormously upset by this internal change. It was akin to giving up being a lesbian, that cataclysmic an identity change. I didn't talk to anyone about it for a long time. When I did confide in friends, a few were upset with me. Some didn't see what the big deal was. One or two were going through a similar experience, which was a relief.

I found I wanted to talk over -- well, deism -- with people for whom it had always existed. The faithful, as it were. But I was terrified of being preached to again. Eventually, I found two women at work, both friends, who became trustworthy confidants. Both of them were devout Christians, one from a scarily Baptist background, the other German Catholic. But, to their everlasting credit, they each absolutely resisted any urge to proselytize. They listened, explained concepts and terms when asked, and, repeatedly, affirmed that it was fine for me to doubt. One friend held me on a beach as I wept, looking up at the stars and freaking out about the very idea of g*d. She never said one word I could construe as a push.

That was 1997 or 1998. A decade later, I'm still feeling my way. Most days, I'm a deist, though not every single day. I have intermittent faith, idiosyncratic definitions, and no conviction there is an afterlife. I do not believe I am made in g*d's image, I assign a female gender to g*d only to make a fucking point, and I don't think g*d is looking out for me (EVER) in an individual way. I resist egotism and arrogance as part of faith, to the best of my ability. And I am definitely not a Christian.

A couple of years after I had to give up being an atheist, my world crashed and has not stopped deteriorating. I lost everything I listed above as my assets, except my inner strength and self-love. I even lost my brain for a while. I'm grateful that my shift in identity occurred before this crash, so I have no doubts about why I might have changed. I didn't have to find g*d, I wasn't driven to it by desperation. That's important to me.

But the point about the timing of it all that I want to make for this essay is: I am not convinced my coworkers would now be able to resist the temptation to preach at me. Nor can I imagine myself now feeling the same degree of trust in conversation with those who are practicing Christians. We have, as a culture, been shoved toward theocracy so hard, so contemptuously, that polarization has crept into personal relationships everywhere.

Freedom of religion includes freedom FROM religion.

The idea that our governing institutions must include religious ideology is an ancient one, suited perhaps to small homogenous groups whose culture was also governed by geography. We outgrew its utility long before we finally adopted another way of doing things, just as we've outgrown economies long before they stop enslaving increasing numbers of the citizenry. It's manifestly clear that those who advocate a return to theocracy do so for either emotional (fear-based) reasons or its advantage in wielding power, or both.

It isn't enough to simply tell them No at every opportunity (which we still have not done). We have to refuse to allow them to frame the discourse. The change in atmosphere as indicated in my own personal life above reveals how successful the theocrats have been in subverting our belief system in this country. Fortunately, I don't have to explain here how this was accomplished and how we can change things: Someone else, Sara Robinson, has written it far better than I could in her series on Learning From The Cultural Conservatives at Campaign for America's Future (hat tip to Jesse Wendel at Group News Blog for promoting these essays and gathering the links together). Read them with enjoyment at --
Part I Messing With Their Minds
Part II Talking Up The Worldview
Part III Taking It To The Street

I'm going to focus, instead, on advocating the removal of existing theocracy from our current government, and that's the institution of marriage. As a lesbian-feminist, I have absolutely no interest in trying to make the definition of marriage as it exists stretch to cover me and mine. I of course comprehend the need for all the tax breaks, legal protection, and validation of our families that occurs with state-sanctioned definitions. But "marriage" carries a residue of religious meaning that taints it, in my opinion.

What I want is for the government to stop conferring legal value to ANY marriages, anywhere; to switch the definitions and support to civil unions, without discrimination as to how those unions are formed; and leave marriage to religious institutions. It's a relic, like baptism or many funeral services. We bury the dead without necessarily invoking g*d, let's do the same for those creating loving commitments that they wish to have legally recognized -- just as we grant divorces without church interference.

And, while I feel concern for all those children being raised in toxic religious environments, kept from public schools or association with those whose belief systems differ, indoctrinated with fear and judgment -- and I do worry about their eventual dysfunctionality when unleashed upon our real world out here -- still, I know the best and brightest of them will find a way to independent thought, reality-based ethics, and love amongst us heathens. After all, I did.

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BAPTIST INTOLERANCE THREATENS COMMUNITY WELL-BEING

(Poster created and copyrighted by Austin Cline)

A controversial evangelical megachurch in the heart of Austin, the Hyde Park Baptist Church, is again in the news this week, this time for overt religious intolerance.

Last July the Church agreed to book its large facility known as The Quarries for the November 18th Thanksgiving interfaith worship organized by Austin Area Interreligious Ministries. This annual event, now in its 23rd year, is "..an expression of gratitude through worship and is co-hosted by a different congregation of faith tradition every year" according to Simone Flowers of AAIM, which invites Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Bahais and others to worship together.

However, four days before the event, the interfaith group was informed by Hyde Park Baptist Church that it would not allow them to gather on church property because of the Muslim presence. According to the Austin American-Statesman, Kent Jennings, one of the pastors at Hyde Park released a statement that says in part:

'The event was cancelled when Hyde Park Baptist Church became aware via a postcard on Monday afternoon, November 12th, that the event was not a Christian oriented event. The postcard promised space for Muslim Maghrib prayer and revealed that the event was co-hosted by the Central Texas Muslimaat, the Forum of Muslims for Unity, and the Institute of Interfaith Dialog. Although individuals from all faiths are welcome to worship with us at Hyde Park Baptist Church, the church cannot provide space for the practice of these non-Christian religions on church property. Hyde Park Baptist Church hopes that the AAIM and the community of faith will understand and be tolerant of our church’s beliefs that have resulted in this decision.'"



Tolerance for their intolerance, that's what they are asking of us. But this is also assuredly a direct result of last month's Values Voters Summit, where the evangelical Right seized on opposition to so-called Islamofascism, with its racist underpinnings, as the best organizing and fundraising mechanism at their disposal now that the anti-gay gravy train is not hurtling down the tracks as well. And according to an article on that subject in this week's Advocate, the Texas-based conservative Christian group Vision America president, Rick Scarborough, stated ''It's the ultimate life issue. If radical Islam succeeds in its ultimate goals, Christianity ceases to exist.''

News8 Austin reports that Austin's largest and oldest synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, stepped forward to host the celebration at their facilities. Interesting how a synagogue failed to recognize the threat of "Islamofascism" in worshipping with Muslims.

And I want to issue a demand here, as a lesbian, of all my queer-by-any-definition cohort, that we fight for the human and civil rights of Muslims just as ardently as we have fought the Christian Right for our own. Muslim-hating is as much our issue as Don't Ask Don't Tell.

Hyde Park Baptist Church is best known in Austin for its insistence on tearing down historic old homes and elbowing its megachurch way, with five-story parking garages, into one of Austin's oldest and most prized mixed-class residential neighborhoods. The battle between the church and the City of Austin, according to the Austin Chronicle "a cause of civic conflict for nearly 20 years", is not yet over.

Last spring, however, the Church was also in the news when a teacher at its child care center, Belinda Sue Lowry, was found guilty of intentionally injuring not-yet-two-year-old Parker Curtis by deliberately swinging her hip into him, causing him to fall backward and injure his head. The child was not treated, and despite an aide who witnessed the incident reporting it to the center's administration, the child's parents were not notified until after the aide had gone to Child Protective Services, launching an investigation, and Lowry was fired.

An in-depth article by the Austin Chronicle states this aide "had reported Lowry's mistreatment of children to day-care administrators 'almost every day' for several months, before asking to be transferred to another classroom. She says administrators ignored her complaints and told her that because she was the only witness to the incidents, her complaints were pointless."

The article goes on to state "When deposed, the center's head administrator, Ginny Braden, had said Lowry would have been fired if she had not resigned – not because Parker fell but because Lowry failed to complete the proper paperwork to report his injury. At the trial, Braden praised Lowry's teaching ability and said she would in principle be willing to hire her again."

This attitude toward children is part of the larger picture of evangelical arrogance masking their terror of modernity: We have the only route to g*d, we cannot bear to hear the viewpoint of another, our needs are more important than those of the community, and authoritarianism is our chief means of enforcement. It's exactly the same no matter which fundamentalist religion you are referencing. For an excellent overview of other Baptist behavior toward children, check out Sara Robinson's post at Orcinus, The Southern Baptist Church Has A Dirty Little Secret.

And here's my personal connection to all this: From ages 5 to 12, I was a member of the Southern Baptist Church. I went to services and children's activities there hoping for community and help -- my family was in desperate trouble, and I myself was barely hanging on. Despite years of beseeching Jesus for intervention, things were only getting worse for me. When I began changing my silent prayers for Jesus to just let me die that day, rather than endure more molestation, abuse and shame, I had one last try at asking for help. I went to Miz Urban, the woman who led the GA's of which I was a member (Girl's Auxiliary, a Southern Baptist girls' missionary group).

(Maggie and brother Bill, ages ten and six, Easter 1966, Dilley, Texas, right before heading for the local Baptist Church)

I had never approached her before, so that alone should have been a clue something was up. She was a staunch church lady, middle-class, influential, with kids in the grades ahead of me. Falteringly, I avoided telling her directly what was happening to me but did say "If you pray to Jesus for something terrible to stop, and it keeps happening, what does that mean?"

What would you do if an emaciated, terrified girl came to you and asked that question?

Well, what Miz Urban did was use the golden opportunity to teach me about Original Sin -- how, if I was suffering, it was because Eve had caused humanity to be cast from the Garden of Eden with her quest for knowledge, and thereafter all women and girls were tainted with her wrongdoing and must carry a greater burden. My best hope, she said, was to keep praying for Jesus to make me clean, because obviously whatever I was doing was letting him know I was, in fact, still a sinner.

I was eleven years old. You can imagine how this hit me.

It took me a few months, but eventually I decided to leave all connection with g*d whatsoever. I betrayed my mother in order to get us away from that town AND my molester, and I never looked back. But the truth is, I was smarter and stronger than most kids I knew. Otherwise, the Baptists might well have killed me.

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IMAGINE MY SURPRISE

When I awaken to start my day, after I fire up the rockets on my PC and hit warp DSL, the first thing I do, of course, is visit Emailandia. Then spam dump. Then, most of the time, I hop on over to Orcinus or Group News Blog.

Partly this is because the two blogs I write for have a notification feature so if someone has posted a comment, I've been informed by email. And if I want to answer, I need to think about it a bit.

But mostly it's because what's a-hoppening at Orcinus or GNB is going to engage multiple layers of my brain, not just the political gecko but also my wobbly g*d interface, my funnybone, my "whoa I hadn't thought about that" child wonder, and my human gang loyalty. All at once. Their snark doesn't make you laugh meanly, and they have kickin' graphics.

I like waking up to my Lieutenant Ellen Ripley persona. Ripley rides my perimeter.

"I thought you were dead?" "Yeah, I get that a lot."

See, here's the scoop about me:

I don't take the pain meds prescribed to me. I don't smoke, drink alcohol, or use drugs. I drink caffeine once a day, if that, and chocolate maybe once a week.

I don't use terminology that others have told me is oppressive. When someone confides in me the ways in which they hate themselves, I am not persuaded that they are right in their self-doubt. I listen to children, always.

I have forgiven the people who failed me and tortured me as a child. I have forgiven myself for allowing them to fail and torture me.

I sleep eight to ten hours a night, when possible. I mute commercials. I buy halogen bulbs and brown eggs. I let myself cry.

When I masturbate, I don't fantasize about anyone I've ever known, even someone I haven't known personally. (Because I don't have their consent.)

I resist being pissed at g*d. I write my whole truth, but my ethic insists I try to inject balance and hope into it.

Somewhere early on, I decided to stay present, to move through this life awake and alert, and mostly I've stuck to that decision. Yeah, there were those episodes of leaving my body when he was lying on top of me, when I was 9, 10, 11. And a few tries at getting stinking drunk as a teenager. But those flights never became habit.

More than one person who believes in past lives have told me I am an "old soul" and that this is my last time driving down the block, this existence. First of all, I don't know how they can tell such things -- is there an expiration date stamped on my aura somewhere? And second, it's sad to contemplate. I like being alive and in a body. Yes, the ways we are oppressing each other is horrendous. Yeah, pain sucks. But being able to draw breath, to notice light and shadow, to feel air on the hairs of my arms, to speak a sentence out loud, to have a child climb confidently into your lap, to make pan gravy and then it over fresh biscuits -- heavenly. I want every second of it I can get.

As Terry Galloway once said, "It's a good life, if you can stand it."

My long-ago mothers left the trees and caves, exposing their small, fleshy bodies to savannah risk, building houses of clay and straw, planting grain, inventing grammar and nouns in unending torrents, and I feel like I owe it to them to keep on truckin', evolutionarily-wise.

So anything that bring out Ripley in me is a drug I allow myself. Those two blogs are Ripley friendly.

You can perhaps imagine, then, what it felt like to discover two posts referencing my recent post here about "My Knees, Part Three" and "Crip Ward Tango" -- amazing, eloquent posts, quoting me at length and going on from there to make dazzling connections. By Jesse Wendel and Sara Robinson (who writes for both those blogs).

Like Jesus, I wept.

What can I say? KTHX doesn't really cut it. I could sing something I bet Sara's heard often, "Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you will know", wo-wo-wo. But then what would I sing to Jesse -- "I wish I was Jessie's girl..."? Alas, I'm an unreconstructed bulldagger. And I don't believe in the divinity of Jesus.

Still, sloppy smooches to you both. Let's keep cross-fertilizing, shall we?

And ya'll, go read the posts there, give 'em some sugar. While you're there, be sure to read the Are You Saved? post and follow the link back to Sara's article at Orcinus about the good news for modern (hu)man. I was going to write about it, but she beat me to it and, as usual, did an awe-inspiring job.

See ya at the sockhop. Bring yr flamethrower.

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