I took part in an interesting and enlightening chat on facebook tonight.\u00a0 A childhood friend of mine and I were discussing life and people.\u00a0 Well, one talked and the other listened.<\/p>\n
The \u201ctalker\u201d said that she has a spouse she loves and a family she adores and yet they hesitate at times to be seen together in public.\u00a0 The whole family\u2019s being together opens them up for stares, whispers and rude comments.\u00a0 She has been screamed at more than once in front of her children by crazy people who called her lifestyle immoral.<\/p>\n
The family went to dinner the other night as a treat to them all and sat quietly as people pointed and stared at their little group.\u00a0 She wondered a thousand times why they hadn\u2019t just ordered pizza and eaten at home instead of running the gauntlet of whispered (and not so whispered) rude comments about their family.<\/p>\n
Trips to the grocery store could be brutal, she said, because zealots and fanatics make it their business to loudly proclaim judgment over the private sex life which was so publicly displayed just by their being together in one place.<\/p>\n
She said that she is constantly judged by the way she looks.\u00a0 People look her over, up and down, and then decide that she\u2019s not the \u201cright kind\u201d of people.\u00a0 She stands out in a crowd of ordinary as decidedly not, and bears the burden of that.<\/p>\n
But mostly, it\u2019s about the sex.\u00a0 It\u2019s about other people deciding that they have the right to decide with whom and how things\u2026.come together\u2026.as though those private moments between two people somehow include and need the approval of anyone else.<\/p>\n
My friend from childhood is<\/i> a lesbian, but it was me telling the story.\u00a0 You see, we both lead alternative lifestyles.\u00a0 We are just at opposite ends of the spectrum.\u00a0 She lives with her beloved Rose and the child they adopted, and I live with my husband and our 7 children and have a sex life which defies society\u2019s rules in our refusal to contracept.\u00a0 We are both derided and ridiculed by society for the lives we lead.<\/p>\n
People of good morals and conscience can differ over political issues, but we should realize that we have something in common too.\u00a0 On both sides of the political fence, where my friend and I find ourselves, we both just want people to let us live our private lives the way we choose and stay out of our bedrooms.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t it funny where you can find common ground if you just sit down and chat for a bit?\u00a0 <\/p>\n
(I\u2019m not trying to start a comment war about the morality\/immorality of the way anyone is living.\u00a0 I just found the similarities in our experiences of discrimination to be interesting and thought provoking.\u00a0 After all, when you strip it away, no one is convinced of the validity of anyone\u2019s argument by yelling, rudeness and insults.\u00a0 We are all people who deserve a basic respect as human beings created in the likeness and image of God.\u00a0 Even the people whose lifestyles we don\u2019t like are created in His image.\u00a0 It\u2019s easy to forget that when we see them as political symbols instead of people.\u00a0 The truth is that when you strip the particulars away, jerks are still jerks and whether you are \u201cright\u201d or not doesn\u2019t change the being a jerk part.)<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I took part in an interesting and enlightening chat on facebook tonight.\u00a0 A childhood friend of mine and I were discussing life and people.\u00a0 Well, one talked and the other listened. The \u201ctalker\u201d said that she has a spouse she loves and a family she adores and yet they hesitate at times to be seen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n