A Conference, A Family, and a Doughnut Shop

Alrighty, it’s time for another politics update!

Please refer back to my politics boilerplate: it is spiritual abuse to tell people they must vote for a certain candidate or political party on pain of sin. Everybody has a responsibility to use their own conscience and common sense to vote for a candidate they think will be better for the common good. Disagreement is inevitable but lying is still a sin.

This week, in Chicago, we had the Democratic National Convention: four days of speeches, comedy routines, cheering and surprisingly good music where the Democrats didn’t really nominate Vice President Kamala Harris, as she’d already been nominated in a virtual roll call several days ago. Besides the usual politicians, this conference featured rap musicians,  Kamala’s adorable little great-nieces, and an incredibly cool drumline. There were rousing,  impassioned speeches by Democrats like Barack and Michelle Obama, Republicans like Adam Kinzinger, and even the independent Oprah Winfrey. Bill Clinton delivered an address as well and I went to take a nap. The Chicks sang the National Anthem in a capella three-part harmony. Morgan Freeman narrated an ad. Keenan Thompson did a little comedy routine teach people about Project 2025. There was a hilarious internet hoax that Beyonce was going to be performing, perhaps alongside Taylor Swift, on the very last day, so thousands of people who don’t even like politics stayed up until midnight to watch the Balloon Drop and all they got was a canned Beyonce song. There was a DJ playing absolutely fantastic music, which was very funny to watch because the delegates couldn’t dance. They bopped back and forth with their signs like ships at sea. There was something for just about everyone to like.

Meanwhile, the inexplicable J. D. Vance made a campaign stop at a doughnut shop in Georgia, apparently with none of the publicists checking if the shop wanted him there, which they did not. It went about as well as you’d imagine. After the bemused doughnut shop clerk asked not to be filmed, he acted as if he didn’t understand that there are different varieties of doughnut and ordered her to fill a box with “whatever makes sense.” I can’t understand why the Trump Campaign keeps sending a man who doesn’t like treats, and cannot even pretend to like treats, into places where treats are sold. If they had any sense, they’d hold any further campaign appearances at farmer’s markets where Vance could buy celery. And for the record, there’s nothing wrong with not liking  treats. Everybody is different. But Vance is so mean about disliking treats. He really seems to disdain people who like doughnuts and such. Give me Pete Buttigeig gnawing on cinnamon rolls like Gollum any day.

But the most important item I want to touch on tonight is the family of the OTHER Vice Presidential Candidate, Tim Walz.

I’ve mentioned that Walz seems like the quintessential fun dad to me. He has two children, Hope and Gus; Gus is 17 and Hope is in her 20s. The children were apparently born after years of struggling with infertility and difficult fertility treatments (not in vitro fertilization, in case you wanted to know, but another procedure called intrauterine insemination which doesn’t involve any destroyed embryos).

In his acceptance speech on Wednesday night, Walz passionately declared his love for his children. Hope responded to this by making a heart gesture with her fingers and giving a sweet smile. Gus was overcome with emotion; he stood up in tears, pointed and cried “that’s my dad!” And the crowd went wild.

Republicans didn’t like this. I saw several famous Republican talking heads mocking the young man for crying with love for his dad. Ann Coulter called him “weird.”  Others called him much worse names. Apparently the Party of Family Values can’t stand it when people value their families with too much gusto.

The backlash against their bullying was swift, but also weird in its own way. Some people just chided Republicans for being so horrified by a young man showing emotion. But a lot of well-meaning people seemed to harp on the fact that Gus happens to be neuroatypical. I don’t know whether Gus is on the autism spectrum or not, but many certainly decided he was. I know that Tim Walz said his son has ADHD and Nonverbal Learning Disorder. I am not a doctor and I’d never heard of Nonverbal Learning Disorder before this week. But based on my very quick googling, I’ve learned that it’s not anything like nonverbal autism as others were assuming. It’s a learning disability, like dyslexia or dysgraphia. A person with nonverbal learning disorder tends to have an average or above average IQ and can have a very high aptitude for communicating in words and listening to words, but they have a great deal of  difficulty with nonverbal types of learning like social skills and visual-spatial organization. My understanding is that Nonverbal Learning Disorder can be co-occurring with autism, but it’s not itself autism. It’s just a learning disability.

As an autistic person myself, I was pretty uncomfortable with the way well-meaning people were defending Gus.

I saw a lot of tut-tutting about “handicaps” and “special needs” and other terminology that disabled people tend to find off-putting. I saw a lot of people saying “person with autism” when the majority of autistic people prefer to be called “autistic people” (but you should ask the actual autistic person which they prefer when you talk to them because we’re not a monolith). I saw a lot of patronizing and making assumptions about his intelligence and how helpless he is. I saw misconceptions about intellectual disabilities. I saw the R-word a horrifying number of times.

I want to make it absolutely clear that there’s nothing wrong with being neuroatypical, or displaying symptoms of a neurodivergence in public. Neuroatypical people are wonderful people. Disabled people don’t owe society normalcy.  If Gus Walz is autistic, that would make me like him more. But I also want to stress that the reason you shouldn’t mock Gus for showing love for his father, isn’t that he’s autistic and we have to make allowances for poor silly autistic people. You shouldn’t mock Gus for showing emotions, because showing emotions is normal.

If you’re a well-adjusted teenage boy and your dad is giving a speech accepting a great honor in front of a live audience of thousands and a television audience of millions, that’s an exciting occasion. If, in the middle of that speech, he speaks fervently about how much he loves you, that’s even more exciting. That’s enough to make anybody, neurotypical or otherwise, burst into tears and stand up shouting. It’s also enough to make you make a heart gesture and smile sweetly as Hope did. It could also make you laugh and applaud, or clasp your hands with tears streaming down your face, or stim by rocking back and forth. Depending on your culture and the way you tend to show your feelings, it might also make you look solemn, and somebody from a different culture might accuse you of being unfeeling because you looked solemn. None of those are worthy of mockery.

Emotions are normal. It’s not bad to have emotions or to show them in public. Leave Gus Walz alone. Have a doughnut, or some celery if you prefer.

And I’ll have another politics update soon enough!

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.