It’s a hard climb to the point where Equality is a Thing. (Source)
Arkansas is now added to the list of states that permits same sex marriage. Judge Chris Piazza’s decision did not come with an automatic stay, and the Pulaski County Clerk (the county where Little Rock is located) says that starting Monday morning, his office will be able to issue gender-neutral marriage licenses.
The decision strikes down more than Amendment 83 to the Arkansas Constitution, which was passed by the state’s voters in 2004. It also declared several laws aimed at preventing same sex marriage that were passed by the Arkansas legislature in 1997.
Arkansas Attorney General had said privately that he wouldn’t oppose a ruling striking the same sex marriage laws in Arkansas, but last week said he believed he had to continue to defend the laws on appeal as part of his duties as the state’s chief lawyer. Among practicing attorneys, there has been hot debate about whether McDaniel would be more ethical to defend the laws or not.
Unless the attorneys on the case get cracking, though, it’s unlikely that there will be a decision before next year, when the make-up of the Arkansas Supreme Court may be more conservative after the mid-term elections.
But come Monday, if any same sex couples want to get married, they should hurry to the courthouse, get their licenses, and let me know. I’d be proud to do the officiating.
Sometimes I am asked how I came to be atheist. The short answer is that I was born that way.
No one is born with a religious belief system – our parents and others have to tell us the stories and indoctrinate us with their religion. That’s why there are so many Hindus in India, so many Jews in Israel, so many Muslims in Arabia, and so many Christians in America. We are indoctrinated into the religion of our parents. No Buddhist kid surprises his Christian parents with his full-blown understanding of the sutras as soon as he can talk, just like no Christian preschooler tells his Hindu parents that the only way to heaven is to accept Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior. We all have to be taught religion.
I think some kids are born skeptical. I think I was, and I see those traits very strongly in my oldest and youngest nephews and in my oldest niece. My youngest niece and middle nephew are plenty smart, as is my son, but they don’t have the attitude of “Nuh-uh, you’ll have to prove that to me!” and the excitement inherent in “That’s so cool! How’d that happen?” that the other three do.
Presbyterian Church, Des Arc, Arkansas (Source: Kevin Stewart)
My mom is Presbyterian and my dad was Catholic. There was no Catholic church in Des Arc, Arkansas, where I grew up. The Presbyterian Church had been founded by my mother’s ancestors when they first came to Prairie County in the 1800’s, so naturally, that’s where we were taken as kids. The ceiling was pressed tin, and I cannot begin to guess how many times I counted those decorative squares out of sheer boredom.
In Sunday school, we were taught all the usual stories. One of my earliest memories is of sitting in the Sunday school classroom coloring a picture of Daniel in the lion’s den and listening to the teacher explain that God had closed the mouths of the hungry lions so they wouldn’t eat Daniel. I remember thinking, “Nuh-uh. They just weren’t hungry, or there was some other reason.”
By that age (probably by about 6), I already knew the truth about Santa, and had ruined it for my sister and one of our friends. My sister and our friend Mischelle will say how mean I was – truthfully, I think I was just so delighted and excited to have my suspicions confirmed that I couldn’t wait to tell them. They were about 4 or 5 when I ruined Christmas for them forever, and neither one has ever, ever forgiven me.
When I was a little older, I realized that the weekly sermon was supposed to be based on the Bible readings that were part of each church service. I started opening the Bible and reading the verse along with the minister, then reading the passages that led up to it and beyond it. So many times I wanted to raise my hand and tell the minister that he was wrong – if he had read the verses that came just before or just after, he would realize how off-base he was. He was taking the verse out of context and building a brand new story around it, and assigning it meaning it didn’t have.
Then I started reading other parts of the Bible in church just so I didn’t have to listen to the inane ramblings from the pulpit. I came across Judges 19, and at that point I could not accept that there was anything good about these stories at all. A few years ago, I reinterpreted the atrocities of that chapter in a short story set in the modern era. It won a scary short story contest.
Concordant readings and the hymns were excruciating. Eventually, I decided I wouldn’t say or sing the words I thought were silly or that I didn’t agree with. I refused to say out loud that I was a worthless sinner (I didn’t think I was) or that I wanted divine intervention in anything (because I didn’t think it would happen). Then I realized that the whole thing was vapid and insipid. It was just another Santa Claus story.
Illustration by Dori Hartley
When I was about 9 or 10, I threw a major hissy fit over church. It was a Sunday morning. We were ready to walk out the door for Sunday school and I had had enough. I remember screaming at my mom, telling her that the whole thing was stupid, that God wasn’t real, that God was really mean and horrible, and that going to church was pointless because praying was stupid and the words we were supposed to repeat every week were stupid and made no sense – hey, I was 9 or 10, so everything I didn’t like was “stupid,” right?
My Catholic dad stepped into the middle of my meltdown and suggested that Mom go ahead to church with my brother and sister. He said that he’d have me watch church on television while they were gone. After I calmed down, he started telling me about the Mover of the First Part. (It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized he was teaching me Aristotelian philosophy and basically regurgitating Thomas Aquinas’s apologetic Summa Theologica.) Of course, my question was, “Who made the Prime Mover, then?” Dad didn’t have an answer, but he said we had to watch church on TV since he had promised Mom.
He told me that there was a TV preacher named Oral Roberts who started every broadcast by saying, “Something GOOD is going to happen to you!” That’s who we would watch. Sure enough, he turned on Oral Roberts, and sure enough, those words came out of the preacher’s mouth the very first thing. As soon as the words were said, Dad switched the channel over to a John Wayne movie.
Dad and I spent many Sundays watching John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda while mom and my siblings were at church. I developed a great appreciation for Westerns (including the spaghetti variety), and was introduced to all-time favorites like the Cheyenne Social Club and Paint Your Wagon, World War II standards like Mister Roberts and Donovan’s Reef, and straight-up classics like The Quiet Man.
I still had to go to church fairly regularly, but after that I always sat next to my dad, and we always found something to giggle about during the hymns and whisper about during the rest of the service. We made an effort to twist things to the absurd. Having a secret, fun co-conspirator made me feel better about having to go in the first place.
I don’t think Dad was atheist. He may have been agnostic, but I suspect he made Pascal’s Wager, because he always told us to get him a priest if we knew he was dying. Not a Presbyterian minister, even though he eventually joined the church and even became a deacon – he wanted a Catholic priest. As it turned out, my father died very suddenly, and there was no time to get a priest. Atheist me insisted that we call one, though, just to satisfy that need he had – because that’s what he had always said he wanted. It was a matter of respect.
When I was about 12, Mom insisted that I take Catechism classes – part of the training for joining the Presbyterian church, even though I insisted that there was no way I would do that. I dutifully memorized the Bible verses and the doctrinal responses. The Presbyterian Church in Des Arc had a tiny congregation, and I was the only student at that time. I spent more time questioning the sense of the verses and the responses to the doctrinal questions, asking “Why?”, and demanding answers to the unanswerable than anything else. The minister’s answers never satisfied me, mostly because things like “God’s ways are mysterious” and “We aren’t meant to know” are completely unsatisfactory answers to someone whose brain thrives on and revels in knowledge. When I was given an answer that rested on convoluted or circular reasoning, it drove me further away from belief, not closer. I never joined the church.
Green Hall, All Saints Episcopal School, Vicksburg, MS
My sis and I were sent to an Episcopal boarding school for high school. During the course of the curriculum, and especially in our senior year, we had to take a class that entailed reading the Bible and being tested on it. I actually looked forward to having this class, because the priest who taught it, Father John Babcock, was very approachable, friendly, and related well with all of us kids.
Unfortunately, a different priest taught that class my senior year. He was more academic than Fr. Babcock, and had us write long, college-like essays on exams. For the midterm, he asked a question that started, “Why do you think…?” Silly me took the bait. I told him exactly what I thought about whatever the topic was. I got a C, which, if you know anything about perfectionist me, you will understand really upset me. When I went to talk with him about it, he told me that I was wrong, so he couldn’t give me a better grade. I was totally pissed – my opinion was only worth a C because it didn’t match his ridiculous opinion.
At Colgate, one of the first classes I took my freshman year was the Philosophy of Religion. Aristotle, Kant, Kierkegaard, Aquinas – this is the class where I read about the Prime Mover and remembered my dad’s explanation from a decade before. None of the explanations that any of the religious apologists offered were satisfactory. The reading selection in that class that hit me the hardest was Kierkegaard’s explanation of the Isaac story in Fear and Trembling. It seemed to me to be the stuff of tortured logic. If religion was the source of morality, then how could Isaac’s sacrifice be morally wrong but religiously right? There was no answer to this except the “leap of faith.” Nope – not only was that answer not good enough, it was ethically reprehensible.
If none of these religious stories and doctrines made sense to me, how could they make sense to other people? WHY did they make sense to other people? I decided to try to find out. I went to different religious services on campus, both Catholic and Protestant. I talked to a friend who went from Colgate to Harvard Divinity School to be a rabbi. (He told me a few years later that the rabbi thing didn’t work out, because anyone who pays attention in Divinity School ends up atheist. He’s a doctor now in Springfield, Massachusetts.) I spoke with a cousin who is a Presbyterian minister. I’ve spoken with friends who have strong faith.
When I ask people why they believe, they tend to get defensive instead of explaining their rationale. My asking them why they believe is not meant to be antagonistic – I really want to know, because to this day I don’t understand why normally rational, compassionate people would buy into this whole faith thing. “You’ve just got to believe,” they tell me. No. No, I do not.
My mother once remarked that because I went to Catholic and Episcopalian services, I must like the ceremonial flavor of the more ritualized “high church” sects. I wasn’t going to church so I could get religion. I was going to try to figure out what other people got out of it. What I concluded was that the ritual seems to calm and comfort the people who attend these churches. Ritual is comforting. We know what to expect, we know what we are supposed to do. Ritual, like meditation, has a calming effect on the human psyche.
Rituals need a purpose, though, and I have never found purpose in a purely religious ritual. I see the point of the ritual in a wedding. I can see the point of ritual when it comes to memorial or funeral services. I see the point of other rituals that mark life transitions, like the naming of a baby or graduation or the passage to adulthood. I understand why human beings want these rituals to formalize life transitions. It doesn’t mean they are any less real if there is no ritual, but it does recognize the transition publicly, and we all want our major life changes to be recognized by others. Recognizing those life transitions is one of the main reasons I got ordained with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and filed my credentials with the Pulaski County Clerk. Those rituals need to be recognized regardless of religious persuasion or non-belief.
When I got married, I agreed to a church wedding. Mostly that was because a church wedding was important to my beloved mother-in-law, who has a very strong faith. She knew this was the only wedding either of her children was likely to have, and it needed to be right for her. Skip and I would have been perfectly happy – and just as married – to have a judge say the words and sign the certificate on our front porch, followed, of course, by a kegger for our law school buddies. Instead, we were married in a giant church and had a reception at a country club.
We had our child baptized for the same reason – not because I wanted to do it, but because it was important to his grandparents. We took him to church when he was about 5 or 6 because we thought he needed to have had that experience. In retrospect, that was an exercise we didn’t need to put him through. I enjoyed the young adult Sunday school class that we went to there, though, and a few of those classmates I still call friends.
I’ll never forget the Sunday the minister of that church decided to teach our class. We were reading something attributed to Paul, and I was challenging at least half of what the blessed apostle wrote.
“Good! It’s good to question your faith!” the minister said to me, and the entire room erupted into laughter. My Sunday school classmates all knew I was atheist, but evidently word had not filtered up to the pulpit.
“I’m not questioning my faith,” I answered. “I’m questioning yours.”
So, I never “arrived” at non-belief. Truthfully, I didn’t have to. I never found a reason to leave non-belief in the first place.
Yesterday, some friends of mine – all of whom have Big Brains and Big Compassion, argued intensely and passionately about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. Because my friends are passionate, compassionate, intelligent people, they are more likely to disagree very strongly when they disagree. Yesterday, tempers flared. Folks got defriended and blocked. “Fuck yous” were tossed about. Names were called. It was decidedly unpleasant all the way around.
I’m very glad they don’t disagree more often.
I haven’t said anything about this case because what I have to say won’t be popular: the American system of justice worked in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case.
Does it piss me off that a 17 year old kid died for no apparent reason? You bet it does. Do I think Zimmerman acted wrongly? You bet I do. Should he have been convicted of murder for his conduct? Not based on the evidence.
The jury did not have enough evidence to convict Zimmerman of murder. The evidence was ambiguous at best, and tended to exonerate him. In order to convict someone of a crime, there can’t be any reasonable doubt as to the criminality of his conduct. When evidence is not clear, when it can be interpreted more than one way by reasonable minds based on the totality of the circumstances, the evidence doesn’t rise to the level of “beyond reasonable doubt.” Therefore, the jury had no choice but to find Zimmerman not guilty. They did not find him “innocent,” mind you. They found that there was insufficient evidence to say he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
It’s true that had Zimmerman not followed Trayvon, both would have their lives today. He was told by the police dispatcher not to follow the suspicious person and he ignored that instruction. He probably ignored it because he knew police were on their way and he wanted not to lose sight of the person he deemed to be suspicious. George Zimmerman should never have followed Trayvon Martin. Period. But once he did, the facts become much murkier, and the most important question becomes whether he was justified in using deadly force after the situation escalated. And that’s where reasonable minds may differ.
A terrible thing we do as a society is second-guess juries based on media hype. What happened was awful, tragic, and ultimately pointless. Zimmerman was probably the aggressor in that he scared a kid who was just walking home. That kid probably made a mistake when he decided to lash out at a guy who was scaring him by following him. The situation escalated out of control, until ultimately a gun was fired. Whose fault was it? Both Zimmerman and Martin screwed up their engagement, and one of them died as a result.
Don’t get me started on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. I’m not going to rehash the evidence. Wikipedia and about ten million news stories do that for us, and they are all available on the Google for anyone who wants to look for them. What we absolutely cannot do is armchair quarterback the conflict and the trial.
I’m not defending George Zimmerman. What he did was stupid, ill-advised, and ultimately cost a child his life. I’m also not persecuting Trayvon Martin. Based on the evidence presented, Trayvon acted in self-defense himself. And when two people reasonably believe they are acting only in self-defense, and one of them dies, there should not be a murder conviction. If reasonable minds can differ in the heat of the moment, they can certainly differ as to whether, in hindsight, the actions of one of those parties rose to the level of criminal conduct.
The bottom line is that based on the evidence it was presented, the jury did the right thing – just like they did in the original OJ Simpson case, and just like they did in the Casey Anthony case. Personally, I would rather have a guilty person walking the streets than an innocent person rotting in jail. All too often, juries seem to convict defendants on less evidence than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” When there is room for doubt, and that doubt is reasonable given the known facts and circumstances, juries should never convict. Even if, in the guts of each and every one of them, they think the defendant is most likely guilty. “Most likely” isn’t the standard of proof. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” is.
What Zimmerman did was wrong. Had he not disregarded the dispatcher’s advice not to follow a person he deemed suspicious, we would not know his name and Trayvon would be a freshman in college somewhere. Had there been no “stand your ground” law, the case may well have turned out very differently. Had George Zimmerman not been armed when he and Trayvon confronted each other – whichever of them initiated the confrontation – the entire situation may well have turned out differently. Zimmerman, not Martin, might be the dead person, and Trayvon Martin might have been acquitted after a national media circus. Or he might have been convicted.
I haven’t practiced criminal law since 1991, but as I recall, the person who initiates the conflict is generally at fault if he has reason to believe that things will escalate to the point of physical violence. In Zimmerman’s mind, he was following a probable criminal. It would not have been unreasonable for him to think that criminal was armed – yet he engaged him anyway. At least, we think he did. No one actually knows whether Zimmerman or Trayvon initiated contact. And that’s why the jury couldn’t convict him.
I’m not going to call for Zimmerman to be persecuted, lynched, chased off a beach, or otherwise harassed. I would like to see his concealed-carry permit revoked, because I firmly believe that his gun probably made him braver and less cautious than he might have been had he been unarmed that fateful night. However, I admit to an extreme distaste for guns and the inflated bravado they inspire. (If I had a dollar for every time someone had remarked that a gun would have taken care of the men who robbed me last year, I’d be rich. And if I’d had a gun handy that night I might be dead. Or in intensive psychotherapy because omigod I shot someone.) What I take away from the Zimmerman-Martin situation is that we need realistic gun control laws, and we as a society absolutely must stop romanticizing how handguns protect us. They don’t. They endanger us, whether or not we are the person wielding them.
I want justice for Trayvon Martin, but I don’t think the criminal conviction of his killer is the justice that will prevent this situation from happening again. It certainly won’t bring Trayvon back. Responsible laws and public education about the use of force and weapons will make a difference. Warehousing George Zimmerman in a prison won’t. And if Zimmerman is going to commit crimes, he, like any other criminal, ought to be judged on the merits of his conduct in that circumstance.
I can’t imagine being George Zimmerman right now. He’s a pariah in the media, which delights in scrutinizing every mistake and case of bad judgment the man makes. Is Zimmerman a shitty person? Maybe. Some of the things reported about him sure paint that picture. He’s also under incredible stress – he HAS to be, given the microscope the national press uses to follow him. No one acts completely rationally under intense, chronic stress. The media scrutiny on Zimmerman’s every move is horrific. If someone followed me around and reported everything I said and did for months on end, and then only reported the negative stuff and not the good or boring stuff, I’d probably be suicidal.
If I were George Zimmerman, I’d move, get plastic surgery, change my hair, and change my name.
I get asked a lot about how I approached the question of religion when my son was young. Did I insist that he follow my lack of belief?
No, I did not. That he has a vivid imagination but a rational and humanistic lifestance is attributable, I think, to making sure he knew how to think for himself.
One of the things we most urgently need to instill in our children is the to think critically about the world around us. Not just when it comes to religion, but when politics, ethics, and personal conflicts are in issue, having the skill to think rationally about things is crucial to a better life.
I taught my child to question everything. Lots of times, I taught him to do it by asking him questions. Yes, my son was raised by Socratic Method. We had rules, but we felt it was important for him to understand the reasoning behind the rules.
I never said no to him without giving him a reason. “Because I said so” is not a reason. “Because I don’t feel like it” is.
If he calmly and rationally rebutted me, I listened. If his argument was better than mine, I changed my position. That being said, if he was argumentative or rude, he automatically lost the argument and often got sent to his room to calm down. If only this process were observed in the political arena, we’d be in great shape!
We explored his questions and his interests together. We did science experiments in the kitchen and back yard. And because Dinosaurs Are Awesome, we kept a notebook full of dinosaur information, and added newspaper and magazine clippings to it regularly. I still have that notebook.
Bedtime stories were just as likely to be stories from history and science as they were from Narnia or Hogwarts. We told each other stories we made up, and we made up stories together.
When he was preschool and elementary school age, we bought age-appropriate books of Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Native American, and other mythology, which we read right along with the children’s Bible our son’s grandmother gave him.
He played the video game “Age of Mythology,” which taught him about the capriciousness of deities. Later he graduated to “Age of Empires,” and when he told me William Wallace was his hero, I knew for sure that these games were okay.
We played the “what if” game, to imagine how things might be different if one thing about the world was different, and we explored the best possible uses of a time machine.
Magazines full of popular science were in every bathroom and on every tabletop. Discover. Archaeology. National Geographic. Smithsonian. We read those articles together, too. When he got older, he would pick up the magazines himself and read them.
We watched science, nature and history shows together. Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin was at his pinnacle when Jack was growing up, and there was a lot of really good stuff on that show. We grieved his death. The Walking with Dinosaurs documentary series (not the new movie) was on the Discovery Channel – back when the Discovery Channel still was about science. Connections – that James Burke documentary series that combined science, history and technology in wonderful ways – was a favorite, too.
I spent time in his elementary school classrooms, and talked not just to him but to his classmates about how to tell stories, all about fossils, dinosaurs, how the legal system works, how amber is formed, and more. I even organized a field trip to the local juvenile court where his classmates and my lawyer friends put some naughty dinosaurs on trial. After the trial, we visited a real juvenile detention facility.
I took him to Sunday school. I felt like I needed to, because I wanted him to understand where his religious friends were coming from. He went to Bible School one summer, too. He was in about second grade. We only did this for about a year, because I’m atheist and it was on Sunday mornings, when civilized people lounge around the house in pajamas reading the New York Times and doing crossword puzzles. I wanted him to learn, but not be indoctrinated.
This is when I knew I had succeeded:
When he was about 11, I asked him whether I had to do the Easter Bunny schtick again that year. “What do you mean, ‘schtick’?” he asked.
“Your father never helps me and I have to stay up late and I really don’t want to,” I told him. (Yeah, I was kind of whiny about it, I admit.)
“You! What about the Easter Bunny?”
“Son, do you really think a bunny hops around the house after we go to bed hiding eggs and pooping jellybeans?”
“Well, no … but can I still have the basket? And all the candy?”
“Sure, sweetheart.”
Fast forward to summer. He had lost a tooth and I forgot to put money under his pillow.
“Mom, the tooth fairy forgot last night.”
“I’m sure she was just busy and lagged behind. She’ll get to you tonight if you put it under there again.”
The next morning he reported that the tooth fairy had once again forgotten. “Just go get my purse. Get a dollar out of my wallet.”
“What? You’re the tooth fairy, too? First the Easter Bunny, now the tooth fairy – what’s next? Santa Claus?” I could tell he was annoyed, but I needed to get to work.
“Yes, son. And right after that comes God,” I said.
He looked at me in pure shock and horror for about three solid seconds, and I wondered what I would say next. Then he burst out laughing.
“I knew all along, Mom.”
Eventually, I sent my son to an Episcopal school. I did this because, after working in the juvenile justice system for a decade, I was terrified of gangs in our local public middle schools. There weren’t a lot of private school options, so I chose the least religious of the bunch, where I thought he would get a good education (that included evolution as real science, not as part of some non-existent controversy). He was inoculated against religion before he went, because critical thinking was automatic and habitual with him by the time he was enrolled there in 5th grade.
He had to take religion classes for one semester both in middle school and in high school. That was fine with me, because I doubted he’d read the Bible otherwise. Let’s face it: it’s a lousy, poorly-written book with plot holes big enough to fly 747s through, but knowing enough to be able to talk intelligently about it is pretty important in our culture.
In middle school, he pretty much kept his head down and just did his work. In high school, though, Father John wanted more out of him. The very first day of class, the priest threw out a question:
“Jack, What do you think prayer does?”
There were pockets of laughter around the classroom as Jack hesitated.
“Yeah, Jack! What do you think?” asked one of the students.
“What’s so funny?” asked Father John.
“You asked an atheist what he believes prayer does!” one of Jack’s classmates blurted. Jack was probably grinning, too. I hope he was.
He said, “I don’t think prayer does anything, but I can understand how it might be helpful for some people.”
I’m happy with his response. My son the critical thinker is also much more diplomatic than I am when it comes to this subject.
We need to give kids credit for being able to think for themselves – but we need to teach them to do it, too. It’s part of our jobs as parents, to give them the tools to understand and deal with the world, and to be able to determine for themselves what is credible.
I’m very tardy with this post. It should have gone up on Christmas Day. Oh, well. Christmas isn’t officially over until tomorrow, when Epiphany strikes.
The year Jack was 15, he and I went to my sister’s for Christmas dinner. When we got there, Susan put a pork tenderloin in the oven and we gathered around the tree to open gifts. Susan’s two boys, ages 15 and 13, were there, as was my mother. We spent a lovely hour ooohing and ahhhhing over what everyone got and gave. It was a very nice time.
We were almost through opening gifts when Su left to check the pork tenderloin we were having for Christmas dinner. She was in the kitchen for a few minutes. The rest of us waited to open any more gifts until she returned.
We were chatting and laughing and not paying any attention to her when Su tip-toed back into the living room and tapped me on the shoulder. “Come here,” she whispered.
I had been sitting on the floor. I got to my feet and followed her into the kitchen.
“Have you ever cooked a pork tenderloin?” she asked.
“Sure,” I told her. “Lots of times.”
“Good. I have something I need to ask you, then,” she said, and opened the oven door. She reached in and pulled out the roasting pan holding the meat. I thought she would ask me about how to tell if the meat was cooked through, or how best to carve it or something. I am always willing to dispense sisterly advice. But that wasn’t what Su wanted.
“Is it supposed to look like this?” she asked.
I gaped.
I blinked.
Su put the pan down on the counter and grinned at me real big. “Shhhh,” she said.
We walked back into the living room, and she beckoned to Mom.
I couldn’t help it. I could barely hold in my laughter, and it was obvious. I do not have a poker face at all. When my mother followed Susan into the kitchen, I did my best to keep three large teenage boys at bay, thinking they were too young and … ahem … tender … to witness what had been prepared for Christmas dinner.
I was unsuccessful. The boys barreled into the kitchen just as their grandmother was in the act of looking at the slab of meat that faced her. Their Gran glanced up with a quizzical look. For a second I thought she didn’t get it.
Then she burst out laughing.
The boys crowded around. “What is it? What’s so funny?” they demanded. Their mothers and grandmother were laughing too hard to tell them.
Su headed down the hall to the bathroom before she wet her pants. When she came back, she suggested that a creamy Bearnaise sauce would be a lovely accompaniment.
That set us off again. Su headed back to the bathroom.
We females of the family enjoyed every bite. “Mmmmmm.” “Yummy.” “This is delightful,” we said.
The boys, for some reason, opted for a meatless Christmas dinner.
And now, for the crucial question:
If a pork tenderloin is circumcised, does that make it kosher?
During a recent visit with cousins from out of state, I learned that my mother’s family’s Mayflower connection is through Mercy Leonard, the wife of Samuel Robinson. I started doing a little digging to confirm this. I haven’t found the Mayflower connection yet, because, hey, I just started looking, but I found something else that grabbed my attention.
Because I get absurdly excited by all of these family history discoveries, I have to share. Grab a Bloody Mary (yeah, we’re related to her, too, but it’s way distant) or pour another glass of grape juice, and settle in for a little history lesson.
In the mid-eighteenth century, both France and Britain claimed parts of what is now Vermont. To further complicate matters, three British colonies – New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts – laid claim to at least a portion of Vermont’s territory. They argued nastily among themselves as to which colony had the right to issue land grants in the area. In 1741, to the relief of New Hampshire and New York, a royal decree finally prevented Massachusetts from claiming lands north of its current border. But the French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years War, broke out in 1756 over territorial lines between the American colonies claimed by France and those claimed by England. Vermont lies less than 50 miles south of Montreal. Its territory was very hotly disputed.
The British finally took control of Ticonderoga (New York) and Montreal (Quebec), and in 1760 signed a peace agreement with France to end the North American portion of the conflict. The North American battles between France and England that started in 1756 had spilled over to Europe, where it the Seven Years War finally ended for good in 1763, making it last – you guessed it – seven years.
Even though the European superpowers had resolved their territorial differences, the British colonies had not. Before the ink was dry on the North American peace agreement, New Hampshire colonial governor Benning Wentworth began making land grants in disputed territory. His motivation was partly a colonial power struggle and partly avaricious land speculation. Many of the settlements that sprang up as a result of Wentworth’s land grants were named for Wentworth and his rich and powerful pals who he hoped would support him when New York predictably got testy over the whole matter. The very first of these land grants went to our ancestor, Samuel Robinson, for Bennington. Samuel knew the area because he had camped there with his troops during the French and Indian War.
Samuel Robinson died in London, England on October 29, 1767. He had been elected by a convention of Vermont towns to go to the king to petition for validation of the New Hampshire land grants. He succeeded but was stricken by smallpox before he could return home. In a twist of fate, his grandson Dr. Benjamin Robinson (1776-1857), would pioneer smallpox vaccination in America.
The territorial dispute among the colonies was not resolved before the Revolution. Vermont was never a separate English colony. Depending on who was asked, it was part of either New Hampshire or New York. In 1777, during the Revolution, Vermont declared itself to be a separate Republic because of the land disputes between New Hampshire and New York. After the Revolution, in 1791, Vermont became the 14th state. The New Hampshire land grants pretty much prevailed once everything shook out.
My 7th great-grandfather Captain Samuel Robinson was a product of the First Great Awakening, an evangelical religious movement that started in New England in the 1730s. This evangelical movement championed a version of separation of church and state that was first proposed by Roger Williams when he founded Providence, Rhode Island, along with Richard and Catherine Marbury Scott. (FYI: Catherine Marbury Scott is my favorite of our direct ancestors. Her older sister, Anne Marbury Hutchinson, was utterly amazing, and I’m going to be just like her when I grow up. That means I’ll be run out of Boston and killed by restless natives on Long Island, but that’s another story.)
Roger Williams promoted the notion that freedom of thought, of opinion, and of the press would inspire individual religious belief, not dogma dictated by a ruling hegemony of religious leaders. Naturally, these religiously “free” places – like Providence – permitted their leaders to impose their version of religion on local residents. The movement was born in Puritan New England, after all. (Non sequitur: Massachusetts was the last state – yes, state – to abolish established religion in the United States in 1833.)
Our illustrious forebear did all he could to ensure only the right sort of Christians were his neighbors. Mercy Leonard Robinson and her children are buried in Old Bennington Cemetery, next to the church Samuel Robinson founded there. The original church building no longer exists, but its replacement celebrated its 200th birthday in 2006.
After the Revolution, Mercy and Samuel’s son Moses (named for Mercy’s father – it’s her I’m researching, remember) was a member of the delegation sent by the Republic of Vermont in 1782 to the Continental Congress to work out the territorial dispute with New York. He later served as governor of the Vermont Republic and oversaw its transition to statehood. He served as one of the first pair of senators from Vermont. Several of Samuel and Mercy Leonard Robinson’s sons were prominent leaders in politics and medicine. Religion, not so much. That was their father’s bailiwick.
Thomas Jefferson is credited in legal doctrine with the phrase “wall of separation between church and state” because of a letter he wrote to the Baptist Church leaders in Danbury, Connecticut in 1803. Before the famous Danbury letter, though, he wrote a letter to Moses Robinson in 1801 on the subject. The original is at the University of Virginia among Jefferson’s papers. Jefferson, who had been President for less than a month at the time the letter was written, expressed dismay that so many of the clergy seemed to want to establish a state religion, and ended his letter with a complaint that still rings in my ears today – mostly because I listen to my own words, and I pontificate about this a lot:
The eastern States will be the last to come over [to Jefferson’s notion of a secular and scientific nation], on account of the dominion of the clergy, who had got a smell of union between Church and State, and began to indulge reveries which can never be realised in the present state of science. If, indeed, they could have prevailed on us to view all advances in science as dangerous innovations, and to look back to the opinions and practices of our forefathers, instead of looking forward, for improvement, a promising groundwork would have been laid. But I am in hopes their good sense will dictate to them, that since the mountain will not come to them, they had better go to the mountain: that they will find their interest in acquiescing in the liberty and science of their country, and that the Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of its benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.
Today, I’d insert “Southern and Midwestern” for “eastern” in that first line. In fairness to Jefferson, not only was the letter written before the Civil War and Dust Bowl devastated the economies of those regions, thereby providing fertile ground for more religious fervor, it predated the Louisiana Purchase.
According to a recent Gallup poll, Vermont is now the least religiously inclined state in the nation. I assume 7th great-grandfather Robinson would not be near as amused as I am by this, especially since his own sons began selling land to the wrong sorts as soon as old Sam was room temperature.
I think there’s a difference between an inheritance of a business in which the heir is actively involved and one of which he is a passive beneficiary. I would be disingenuous to say that there should be no inheritances – I want to leave something for my son to make him more comfortable in his later life, just like I want to be able to give him something to help him get a good start in life.
I think it’s a terrible idea for family farms and small businesses, for example, to be passed to the next generation with such burdensome taxes that they have to be sold or leveraged into a non-viable situation. That deprives the family of a livelihood and makes it easier for larger, wealthy corporations to gobble them up. Corporate-level farming is not very good for owners responsible for land stewardship. Independent farmers morph into seasonal laborers because they can’t pay a tax. Plus, corporate farming is terrible for the land, for water supplies increasingly polluted by farm chemicals, for the continued existence of pollinators, and for the diversity of our food supply. Plus, business corporations can indeed get so big by consuming their smaller rivals that they effectively undermine the free market.
Does inheritance create a dynasty? Yes, if there’s enough of it and the heir doesn’t squander it. If the second, third, and successive generations are up to the task, then they benefit. If they aren’t up to the task, the “dynasty” is over pretty quickly. Given the fact that the generations tend to get exponentially larger as time goes by, even competent heirs that come along later get a smaller piece of the overall pie until, at last, it’s gone. A lower percentage of each successive generation can participate in the operation for it to remain profitable. Like later-born children throughout history, one takes over the helm while the others find their own ways, or else the entire realm is cannibalized to give each heir a relatively smaller portion. If that portion is too small to be of benefit, the heir sells it to someone who adds that portion to his own, and the building of an empire starts all over again.
Problems arise when a monopoly is created by this process – if smaller operations are taxed just because of the death of their progenitor, they are left with no option but to sell out. In the strictest sense, neither unbridled capitalism nor strict socialism really works. A healthy society must strike a balance between the two.
Let me be clear about where I stand on other relevant taxes, though: I have no problem with a capital gains tax tagged to the actual income tax rate for the person receiving that capital gain. I have no problem with higher taxes on wealthier people. I certainly have no problem with a graduated corporate tax rate and eliminating subsidies for operations that make significant profits. In fact, I think it’s obscene for vastly profitable corporations to be supported by the government. What is the point of subsidizing a company with millions of dollars when it makes billions of dollars in profits? Unless there is some overarching public interest that is actually served by the subsidies (affordable food for the entire population, for example), subsidies should not exist.
Under the scenario I describe, I would pay considerably more in taxes than I do now because I was fortunate enough to receive an inheritance from which I receive passive income. I would really like those taxes to be put to work, improving the lives of my fellow citizens. Feeding the hungry, providing safe places for everyone to live regardless of income, providing education for anyone who wants it regardless of their ability to pay, rehabilitating substance abusers, job training for anyone who wants it, universal health care, rehabilitation of criminals, and scientific and technological research and development would be excellent uses of my higher taxes. It would improve not just their lives but also my world.
Pardon me while I bitch. This is not a political rant. This has nothing to do with social justice or a better word for humanity. This rant is all about me me me. So, if you aren’t interested in the self-absorbed ravings of a cranky middle-aged white woman, this post is not for you. Frankly, I can’t imagine that anyone would be interested, but it’s cathartic to write it out, so here goes:
I am sick of waking up every morning with a migraine. Today is day 57. Consecutive day 57 with no break. Every day between 4 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. I wake with a pounding skull.
Sure, the drugs usually knock it out, but it takes at least an hour for them to work – if they work – and they work best if I go back to sleep for at least 30 minutes while they’re taking effect. Since I can’t go to sleep on command, especially with a jackhammer or icepick working my skull, it’s not like I can set an alarm – half the time I wake up two hours later. This is really cutting into my day and what little productivity I can actually eke out between browsing Reddit and clicking links on Facebook. (Which, of course, are the prime reasons to get out of bed to begin with, right? Except I have a laptop and an iPad, not to mention a phone, so I could do that from under the covers…)
I have a job – although I’m self-employed because who would hire someone with more sick days than good days? I volunteer. I have clients and people and organizations I’ve made commitments to, and it’s getting harder and harder to meet those commitments. I only take cases without crushing deadlines.
I make those commitments because I care passionately about the world I live in, and I want to make it better. That’s why I became a lawyer to begin with – to help improve the world. It’s why I volunteer with some of the organizations I volunteer with. (I volunteer with the others just because I love history.)
Some days I can’t get out of bed. Some days I have to stay under the covers in a dark room with my handy barf bowl within reach. Sometimes I have multiple days in a row like that.
Life with Migraine
I’ve had migraines all my life. I was diagnosed in fourth grade when my mother and teacher became concerned. My vision faded and blurred during class when I had tremendous, pounding headaches. The really bad headaches came only occasionally, usually just three or four times a year. I had smaller ones frequently, though. The pace of my most severe headaches increased as I got older. I’d have bad ones as often as six or eight times a year throughout the decade of my 20s. I had a small sofa in my office so that when they hit, I could take a nap until the painkillers worked. Back then, there were no such things as triptans, and I didn’t want to go home if I could possibly remain functional. I had too much to do. Over-the-counter medications had virtually no impact. I tried them all. The only things that got rid of the worst headaches were narcotics, sleep, and time.
Three or four times a year, only time cured them. I would spend two or three days in blinding pain, vomit uncontrollably, and long for something as soft as it was cool. My pillow was too hard. Rolling over in bed meant torpedoes homed in on my cranium, unleashing their fury. But these bad headaches only happened three or four times a year. They were definitely inconvenient, but I could deal with them.
The Tipping Point
In 1997 I was in an auto accident that resulted in severe whiplash. Within a year, I was having severe headaches weekly. Then the time between headaches narrowed to the point that I would have only three or four days between attacks. The attacks themselves lasted two or three days.
I had a client who was a doctor. “Is this stress-related?” I asked him one day. “Probably,” he answered, and wrote me a prescription for a tranquilizer. It didn’t help, except to help me sleep when the headaches came.
I went to a clinic that specialized in headaches. “Live with it,” the neurologist there told me. “There’s nothing we can do but manage the pain, and we’ll do that without painkilling narcotics.”
How do you “manage” pain if there’s no way to treat the underlying cause and painkillers aren’t an option? I didn’t go back.
When one migraine had already lasted for two days and I couldn’t stop throwing up, my husband took me to my regular doctor. They gave me shot of Imitrex. It didn’t work. “It’s not a migraine if Imitrex doesn’t work,” I was told. It was bad information, but that was typical of what I had already encountered. Even the doctors had no clue.
Finally, a friend of my sister’s who worked in the ER of a teaching university got me in to see one of the top neurologists at the medical school. I met Lee Archer. He is not just my doctor; over the last 15 years, he has become my friend.
The first thing he did was prescribe Imitrex. I told him about the time I was given a shot of it that didn’t work. He shrugged. “If you wait too long, and if the headache is too far progressed, you really do have to ride it out,” he told me. “Take the pills when you sense the aura, or, if there’s no aura, as soon as you feel it coming on.”
Imitrex is a miracle drug.
I don’t mean “miracle” in the sense that it has supernatural, non-understandable properties. I mean that it really does stop a migraine in its tracks, and it does so without significant side effects. Imitrex gave me a semblance of a life back. That, to me, is miraculous. I don’t know who stumbled upon the formula for Imitrex, or who found that it worked for migraines, but they are a hero.
But the headaches still came too often – I was limited by insurance to nine of these precious doses a month. Since some headaches required two doses, we had to find some way to prevent them from happening as frequently.
I’ve tried every prophylactic out there over the last 15 years, from beta-blockers to botox to butterbur. (That’s just some stuff I’ve tried that starts with B. I’ve been through the rest of the alphabet, too, including A, which included acupuncture, which … don’t even ask. Yes, I am desperate enough to try powdered horn of tiger testicle at this point if some witch doctor hints to me that it might work.)
Add to that, I saw a Huffington Post report a couple of days ago that included an appearance by the mother of Melissa Dwyer, a 22-year-old with daily migraines who finally killed herself this past summer because she could get no relief from any medications anymore. At 22, her life was effectively over, so she ended it. I understand it, but I don’t have to like it.
When the last of the meds stop working, I won’t have any desire to continue living in constant debilitating pain, either. What will be the point? I will be of no use to anyone, and I will have no quality of life. Already I can’t take care of myself when the headaches are bad. I don’t know that I could get out of a burning house, or even dial 911 and coherently ask for help. My migraines are often accompanied by transient aphasia. Yes. Me. A woman who talks and writes and wields words for her vocation and her avocation has aphasia. The worse the headache, the worse the aphasia.
I long ago passed the tipping point. Since 1997 I have had more migraine days than pain-free days. That’s 16 years.
When I don’t feel well, I get cranky. I avoid people because I know how miserable it is to be around me. Just ask Jane. She was my paralegal for more than 15 years, and she’s still my best friend. She has seen me deteriorate over the last (almost) 20 years. She’s seen me fall into a deep depression and she’s been there to cover my ass and to prop me up when things have been worst. No one else has ever done for me what she has – not anyone in my family and not any other friends. Now that we aren’t working together I miss her tremendously. Without her, I’ll be dead, and the cats will have picked my bones clean a month before anyone discovers my body.
Plus, I’m an organ donor, dammit; suicide’s just not an option under these circumstances.
Prior to finding my current neurologist in the late 1990s, relief only came from narcotics and Phenergan, both of which are still in my diminishing chemical arsenal – diminishing, because after a while, drugs just stop working and for some insane reason doctors just won’t increase the dosage to toxic or lethal levels. (I know. I don’t understand, either. If Westley could develop an immunity to iocane powder, then surely by now I am immune to poppies.) The neurologists before my present one told me I’d just have to live with the headaches and good luck with that.
There is nothing worse than a doctor giving up on you – and telling you to give up, too.
Lawyering with Migraines
I’ve quit practicing law twice, the first time in 2001. The headaches were awful then, but I had enough of a financial cushion that when Jane’s son was born we decided to scale back the law practice and work from home, only taking the cases we really wanted. That was a good decision, but significant necessary cost overruns on a home remodel coupled with the financial crisis in 2008 torpedoed my portfolio. I no longer had a choice, so I went back to work full-time.
I quickly realized I wasn’t up for extended litigation or stressful cases. Despite that, the following year I foolishly created a law firm with two other lawyers. By the fall of 2010, I had to completely stop going to court on contested cases. I couldn’t – and still can’t – reliably know if I’ll be able to function well enough to advocate for a client, and the anxiety over being able to function is as debilitating as the migraines themselves. I didn’t tell my law partners. I was afraid to. I just got our associate to go to court with or for me when I couldn’t settle a case to a client’s satisfaction. I called it “training.”
Did I mention that depression and anxiety are byproducts of chronic migraines? Depression is crippling. Anxiety is eviscerating. Of the two, my anxiety is far worse.
Here’s a fun fact: migraines exacerbate anxiety, which in turn exacerbates migraines. It’s a never-ending feedback loop that intensifies with each completed circuit, and at some point should equal and then exceed the electromagnetic strength of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, at which time I expect a black hole of misery to singularity itself into existence. Maybe a new boson will be discovered when the whole thing implodes. Let’s hope so, for science.
Here’s another fun fact: in the throes of a migraine, movement hurts. Every doctor I’ve ever been to tells me to exercise. Sometimes I can’t even turn my head without feeling the whole world ripple, and they want me to exercise. I tried. I paid a personal trainer for several years. Cardio workouts invariably gave me a headache. If I was using enough weight in resistance exercises to do me any good, the effort made the blood pound in my brain. I did it as long as I could, and finally, I gave up. Some days I can’t even walk up the stairs in my own house. It’s not my knees or my back that object – although they do. It’s my throbbing head. That much effort is just beyond me some days. Sometimes just walking across the room takes herculean effort.
Crisis
In the summer of 2011, things fell completely apart. There were damaging forces undermining me other than my deteriorating health, although I wouldn’t know that for another six months. I kept trying, like Sisyphus with that impossible boulder, not knowing that those other elements were working against me. I knew about the health issues and knew I was pushing that rock uphill. I just didn’t know that there was no way ever to get the rock to the top.
The feedback loop grew worse. I was working eighteen-hour days and accomplishing virtually nothing. I couldn’t sleep, because the lack of accomplishment made me extra anxious. I was at the office before 7 a.m. Except on nights when Socrates Cafe met, I didn’t leave until after 10 p.m. and often didn’t leave until after midnight. Even on weekends.
The lack of sleep showed in the quality of my work, and in my ability to work. I fell asleep during meetings. I fell asleep during telephone conversations at the office. I fell asleep mid-sentence, then would wake with a jerk. And the migraines just got worse. Instead of taking me off them, when I complained to my doctor that one of my six daily meds for migraine/depression/anxiety was contributing to the lack of sleep, he actually increased the dose. I stopped sleeping at all except for an hour or two a night when I would doze fitfully as I lay, frustrated at my inability to really sleep, in my bed. Night lasted forever, every single night.
Guess what happens when someone doesn’t sleep? Well, when a migraineur doesn’t sleep, her migraines get worse. I was giving myself shots of Imitrex at least once a week, and saving the shots for only the worst of the headaches. The worst came that often. And when anyone doesn’t sleep for a long enough period of time, she starts hallucinating. “Long enough” in this context was just a few weeks – at least, that’s when it finally dawned on me that shit was seriously fucked up.
My hallucinations weren’t the surreal technicolor movie we’ve been told happens with psychedelic drugs. They were subtle. Out of the corner of my eye, I’d see a shadow. It was a beaver-shaped shadow, maybe a nutria or groundhog. It sat on its hind legs and teased me from the periphery of my vision. I knew it wasn’t there, I knew it wasn’t real, but I kept seeing it. After a couple of weeks of this, it was joined by a crab-walking kind of prehistoric hominid figure.
The paleo-geek in me wanted nothing more than to get a really good look at this new creature. I knew it existed only as a result of sleep deprivation. I knew full well it wasn’t really there. Intellectually, I knew I was hallucinating. But the opportunity to observe an ancient hominid was about the coolest thing ever. Frustratingly, he stayed just in the corner of my vision, too, so I couldn’t get a good look at him. When I tried to look directly at any of these nutria or hominid-shaped shadows, they’d skate even further to the periphery, or they’d disappear entirely.
These critters never darted in front of me, they never stood where I could take a good, long look at them, and they were never more than shadows. This went on for about two months.
I finally gave up when things at work got so bad that I missed the third paycheck in a row. For about a year my paychecks had been spotty, and as a result, my finances were in a disastrous state. I had humbled myself to ask for help from my mother – at 49 I felt like a complete failure asking my mother for money. I was working 18-hour days, migraining almost constantly, not sleeping, seeing shadows that I knew weren’t there, and I couldn’t pay my mortgage. I was in a constant and frantic state of panic about money. And in early September 2011, the bottom officially fell out.
Without a bottom, there’s no limit to how far one can fall.
In early September 2011, I had my first panic attack. It was the first of many to come. Very few people knew that, and of those who did, none cared. They thought I was being silly. Heart palpitations, escalating circular thoughts spiraling upward in intensity, cold sweats, shortness of breath, and the inability to stop crying are not silly histrionics. No one chooses to experience these things, and no one wants to experience them in public. Certainly, I did not want to experience them in front of people who looked at me with narrowed eyes and a curtly dismissive attitude.
They told me to stop crying all the damn time. They wanted me to get over it, whatever “it” was.
I didn’t have these attacks because I wanted attention. I wanted anything but the attention they garnered me. I wanted to be able to interact normally. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to enjoy life. I wanted to enjoy my son’s company, revel in my nephew’s accomplishments, and interact with members of my family normally.
I wanted to stop crying all the damn time.
I would have if I could have.
Mental health crises are very poorly understood by most people in general. Someone having a “nervous breakdown” is scary to those who see it. It’s not nearly as scary to them as it is to the person experiencing it, though.
I went into an intensive therapy program. My family supported me going into therapy but had the impression that when the intense program was over, I’d be “fixed,” back to being the old me, and things would return to normal. They had absolutely no appreciation for how hard it was just to get up in the morning – not because I was depressed, but because I was sick.
Practicing law full-time was off the table, so I needed to create an entirely new career for myself out of thin air. And this new career, whatever it might be, had to provide me with enough income to be able to support myself while allowing me the luxury of having chronic, debilitating, disabling migraines more days than not. This crisis was a crisis of physical and mental health, sure, but there was a hell of a lot more to it.
For more than a month, the migraines grew measurably worse. I had to have shots of Imitrex every day for four solid weeks. I dropped everything: work, the activities I enjoyed, the friends I had, and even Socrates Cafe, which was by then the only thing I still did for pleasure.
I didn’t recognize myself anymore. I used to be competent, intelligent, organized, articulate, practical, strong, and forthright. A driving force. A hard worker. Diligent. Steadfast. Calm. I had never become part of any organization that didn’t then make me its leader. Sure, I procrastinated a lot, but I got stuff done. Now? Now I was a shell. I was fragile and tender. I couldn’t hold a thought in my head.
My family usually saw me in tears when they saw me at all, which was rarely. They were disgusted with me. They had absolutely no understanding of what was happening to me physically, fiscally, emotionally, or psychologically. They treated me like I was an addict who just needed to get my shit together. Tough love would take care of the problem I had become. In fact, they used the same methods and phrases on me that families of addicts are taught to use with their addicted loved ones. (There are addicts in my family, but I’m not one of them except when it comes to complex carbohydrates.)
Their criticism and their judgment and their lack of sympathy cut me to my core. They never asked how I was doing. They ignored me except when I had to reach out to them because I needed something from them I couldn’t get elsewhere.
I’ve always had social anxiety, but it was a lot worse during this period. They were completely clueless, and I knew of no way to clue them in. I doubt they even wanted to be clued in. As best I could tell, they believed they knew what was going on with me. I just needed more therapy. I just had to pull myself up by my bootstraps, after first designing the bootstraps and attaching them to my heels, of course.
When one has to put one’s face deep into quicksand to even figure out if there are bootstraps hidden somewhere down there to tug on, such an attitude from the people we need support from is hardly “supportive.” Furthermore, I didn’t need talk therapy. I needed practical solutions to very concrete problems, and I was fresh out of ideas. I needed a plan. I was expected to come up with it on my own, out of thin air. I couldn’t possibly do that, in the midst of a crisis and alone.
I had never worried much about other people’s opinions of me, but suddenly I was acutely aware:
I had been weighed. I had been measured. And I had been found wanting.
When the people I needed support from the most made it clear that they were not sympathetic, the impact hit me as forcefully as Ademar’s fist hit William’s gut.
I reached for someone, anyone, who might be. One couple who I had considered to be close friends reacted awkwardly when I told them what was happening. They backed away nervously, and our friendship never recovered. Another friend was sympathetic but had problems of their own. Another wanted to be supportive, but our relationship had never been one of sharing intensely personal stuff, so I dropped it. It just didn’t feel right. (In mid-November 2011, at Skepticon IV, that friend and I sat next to each other in the second row with tears streaming down our faces as we listened to JT Eberhard talk about his own breakdown. JT’s words didn’t just hit close to home, they bombed me like a Blitz.) Another friend I reached out to told me that they’d been there and done that, lost everything, and moved on. I felt guilty burdening them when I couldn’t figure out how to move on.
In the summer of 2011, an old romance started to flare back up when an ex-boyfriend and I encountered each other at Socrates Cafe. We didn’t see each other daily but talked regularly. During the period of intensive therapy, he was the only person who made sure to talk to me every day to check on me. He had a crisis of another nature during that time, though. He hung on gamely until Thanksgiving, at which point it was way beyond time for me to give him permission to say goodbye. He was a champ as long as he could be, and loyal to his own detriment. He was the only unselfishly supportive voice that spoke to me regularly and consistently during the worst of that time, and I will forever be grateful to him for that. Once we said goodbye, I had no one.
I was afraid of being isolated, but I was more afraid that I would spiral downward emotionally if I didn’t interact with people. I made an effort to reclaim the positive parts of my life. Things still weren’t good, by a long shot. I had days at a time when I could not make myself get out of bed. There was no one there to care. I stopped trying to make meals. I didn’t have the energy to plan and cook them. There was no pleasure in the effort – and I used to love kitchen chemistry. I gave up on dating. Sharing the mess I had become with someone else would not be fair, right, or kind. It certainly wouldn’t be loving.
For the next nine months, I had no bottom. There was no light to show me how I might get out of the situation I was in. My ragged fingernails clung to a single strand of rope that barely held me above a yawning chasm. It was a very spongy and porous rope that sometimes dissipated almost entirely. Mostly I dangled from it, but occasionally, on rare good days, I was able to climb up and stand on it like a tightrope walker. Standing on it and stretching, I couldn’t reach up far enough to grasp the edges of the bottom I knew had to be somewhere above me. But the source that provided the tightrope regularly threatened to take even that away. Despair consumed me. I made futile stabs at reorganizing my life, none of which were realistic given my limitations and my needs. I had no hope.
Deus ex machina.
A year after that day in September, a light finally broke through. I looked up. There was an end in sight to at least part of my problems. I suddenly had something I could sell to ease the financial stress, and then, with that part of the burden lifted, I could focus on healing. The migraines didn’t go away, but the rope I was dangling from slowly started rising. The pain-free days started looking a little brighter.
In December 2012, things got measurably better. I closed on the sale of two investments, which finally allowed me to breathe financially. I now have a bottom, and instead of it being somewhere over my head in the ether, I’m at least sitting on it. I can touch it. Of course, December 2012 was when I was held at gunpoint for half an hour in my own bedroom, so there’s that.
Finding that bottom made things better. I still have days at a time when I can’t get out of bed. I rarely cook. I still can’t imagine anyone being willing to share their life with me. Some days I still can’t think straight. It’s as though someone has played a bad game of golf in my head and left gaping divots where important parts of my brain should be. I feel the bruises from the ricocheting balls.
Unless it’s so bad I can’t get out of bed, even when I have a migraine I force myself to get out of the house to do the things I still can. The two hours a week spent at Socrates Cafe is still my favorite activity, but more and more often those two hours are more than I can handle. I go to gatherings with my friends and drink soda water because alcohol triggers migraines. (Hell, everything triggers migraines.) I host parties because I can’t drive with a migraine. More than a few of those parties have lasted longer than I needed them to, and seeing the last guest leave has been a relief. I don’t want anyone to know when that happens.
I hide my headaches from other people. Only a few people know that I have them so often. I doubt most have any idea that I’m often on painkillers when they see me. Instead of incapacitating me, like narcotics tend to do to people who don’t have to take them often, they are what allow me to function. I don’t take them freely; I hoard them and dole them out stingily to myself. I am not addicted, but I do rely on them. Thankfully, because of the reduced financial stress, I have to rely on them less and less.
Life is not done with me. I have things I want to do. I have goals and plans and projects and ideas. I have books to write, things to make, places to go, dreams to fulfill, and things to build. I have a son I adore, even if he doesn’t need me as much as he did when he was a kid. I have a dream that I might even, someday, have a man to share my life with. That’s probably a pipe dream, but every once in a while I take that dream out and fondle it so that I remember how.
Working full-time isn’t an option. I used to think I didn’t need disability insurance – even a blind lawyer can dictate contracts, right? Before I was 35, I never imagined that any health problem would prevent me from earning a living on a long-term basis. Now I know differently.
In a fit of hope, I bought a bike. I can glide when the pace gets too rough, right? Take things slowly and coast. Except, every time I’ve ridden the damn thing, I’ve ended up out of commission for at least a day. I still can’t exercise. Migraines still rule me.
Recently, I posted some hate mail on Facebook that the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers received from someone named Carey Dove. This email said that atheists have no heritage in the United States, that we aren’t real patriots, and that we don’t have the courage to step up and play with those who are.
Dear Carey Dove:
I’ve studied constitutional law, history, and my own genealogy. I know what my heritage is. Apparently, you don’t know me at all.
So, let me give you a little introduction to me, my knowledge about the Constitution, and whether or not I have any American heritage.
We’ll start with the constitutional lesson.
Portrait of George Mason (1725-1792), Dominic W. Boudet, after John Hesselius, c. 1750. This is a copy of the original, which was destroyed.
George Mason wrote the first bill of rights to be adopted in the Americas. His Virginia Declaration of Rights, written in the spring of 1776, influenced revolutions on two continents. The Declaration of Independence drew heavily from it. The Bill of Rights plagiarized it. The French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen tracked it. Its final provision was to grant religious freedom to Virginians.
Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, 1940, Howard Chandler Christy 1872-1952, American)
George Mason was a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia when fifty-five men from twelve of the newly formed states argued about how to replace the unworkable Articles of Confederation. Mason dominated the discussions. Ultimately, he was one of three delegates who voted against it, primarily because it did not contain a bill of rights – there were no constitutional guarantees of personal liberty.
He would be vindicated four years later when the Bill of Rights was adopted. The first two of those enumerated rights listed in the very first of the amendments address religious freedom.
So, now we have established that our constitution, and the history that preceded it, includes religious freedom. That means the freedom to dissent and to reject religion, because without the freedom to dissent and reject what we find to be wrong with religion, there can be no freedom in our practice of religion. And if we ultimately reject it all? That is the ultimate freedom.
So now I’ll embark on explaining the pedigree I have in this country.
A few years ago I was chosen to be on the Board of Regents that oversees the maintenance and operation of George Mason’s historic home in Virginia.
Gunston Hall and its garden, Wikimedia Commons
I was invited to sit on that board because of who my ancestors were. My European ancestors not only lived in colonial America, but they gave their time, talents, efforts, and money in public service to their colonies. They were politicians, military officers, doctors, judges, ministers, founders of schools, and founders of towns. They spoke out. They acted. They were patriots.
Who they were and what they did has shaped our country and its government. They shaped our states and our institutions. Their words and actions are this country’s heritage, and this country is their legacy.
On a very personal level, who they were and what they did has shaped who I am personally, and what I do. Their behavior, values, strengths, words, intelligence, and deeds are my heritage, and I am the culmination of their legacy.
Anne Marbury Hutchinson statue at the Massachusetts State House. The child is her daughter Susannah, who survived the Pelham Bay massacre.
One of my favorite ancestors is my 11th great aunt, Anne Marbury Hutchinson. Anne Hutchinson was a well-liked and respected mother of 15 children. She was brilliant, charismatic, and a passionate intellectual. She was also the polestar of a controversy that nearly shattered the religious experiment that was the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Anne and her husband Will came to America in 1634 with a Puritan minister named John Cotton, who would eventually become the most preeminent theologian in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Unlike the Puritan ministers already in Boston when he and the Hutchinsons arrived, John Cotton believed that a person had no control over his salvation, which depended solely on God’s grace. This was Calvinist predestination in its purest sense, but it was contrary to what other Puritan ministers were teaching. They taught that the good works done by a person were the only ticket to salvation.
Boston was a small town in 1634. Click to embiggen, and note that every single household is listed. Will & Anne Hutchinson and their large extended family stayed with friends and relatives while their own home was being built. The population of the entire Massachusetts Bay Colony and Plymouth Plantations was about 5,000 people. (Map from the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center Collection at the Boston Public Library)
The Hutchinsons were wealthy in England but even wealthier in the colony. They built one of the largest homes in Boston. After church services, Anne Hutchinson would invite other women to gather in her home to discuss the sermons and the Bible. Anne’s meetings were very popular with the women of Boston, and soon men joined in.
Anne Hutchinson Preaching at Her House, 1901 (Howard Pyle, 1853-1911, American)
Like her mentor, John Cotton, Anne emphasized the importance of a state of grace over good works. People liked what she had to say. They were focused on feeding their families and running their businesses; they didn’t have time for unlimited acts of charity. As the number of people at her meetings escalated, Anne’s philosophy quickly leaked back to the Puritan clergy. Boston was a very small town in 1634.
The ministers claimed that Anne’s “unauthorized” religious gatherings “might confuse the faithful.” They argued the theological point of predestination – good works versus inherent grace – among themselves, and ultimately, Anne was charged with heresy – not because the leaders of Boston disagreed with her philosophy, but because they claimed she accused them of being more concerned with good works than the grace of God, to which she basically replied, “If the shoe fits…”
John Cotton, however, was not charged.
Anne Hutchinson on Trial, 1901 (Edward Austin Abbey, 1852-1911, American)
Anne was a woman, so she was not authorized to preach.
Left to her own devices, Anne Hutchinson, the first female defendant in any trial in America, defended herself at her heresy trial, which was prosecuted by John Winthrop, her neighbor and the governor of the colony. Governor Winthrop was most displeased with Anne’s religious dissent because his wife, Margaret, was very fond of attending the meetings in the Hutchinson home and brought home with her ideas he found unbecoming in a woman.
And like the Reverend Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, who was modeled after him, John Cotton essentially betrayed Anne to the powerful citizens who brought the charges against her. When he was called to testify, Cotton denied that he had incited any dissent in Anne, and smiled and shrugged, claiming he did not remember the substance of any of his conversations with her.
It is no accident that this red A, the icon of the secular movement, evokes the scarlet letter Hester Prynne was required to wear in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel.
Upon hearing his repudiation, Anne Hutchinson did something she had been forbidden to do: she began to teach the men. While her teaching had been in private before, here, now, at her trial for heresy, she took off the gloves and came out punching. “If you please to give me leave, I shall give you the ground of what I know to be true.” Without waiting for permission, Anne continued speaking, explaining her own history, her dissatisfaction with the Church of England, and her search for the truth she knew had to exist.
Governor Winthrop attempted to interrupt her. She ignored him and continued.
“God did discover unto me the unfaithfulness of the churches and the danger of them, and that none of those ministers could preach the Lord aright.” Scripture fell from her lips as she brazened on, daring to teach, despite an exchange with Governor Winthrop earlier in her trial during which they had exchanged barbs about the ability of women to teach. (“What, now you would have me teach you what the Bible says?” she mockingly exclaimed to him.)
One of my favorite quotes from Anne’s lecture during the trial is:
“How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment?” Never mind that, chronologically speaking, Abraham knew nothing about any commandments.
Governor John Winthrop was also, conveniently, one of the judges, so naturally Anne Hutchinson was convicted, and in November 1637, she was banished from Massachusetts.
Anne was 43 years old at the time of her trial. She was also pregnant, and during the trial she suffered a miscarriage. The superstitious Puritans allied against her saw the severely malformed fetus as proof that Anne had fallen from God’s grace. Chromosomal anomalies are not uncommon in older mothers. This would be Anne’s last pregnancy.
Anne’s youngest sister was my 10th great-grandmother, Catherine Marbury Scott. Catherine and her husband, a shoemaker named Richard Scott, came to America on the Griffin with the Hutchinsons and John Cotton in 1634. They left Boston with Anne, first joining Roger Williams at a place he called Providence, in the Rhode Island and Providence Plantations secured by Williams as a separate colony. Williams had himself been banished from Boston in 1635, the year after the Hutchinsons and Scotts had arrived, for preaching that one did not need a a church in which to worship.
The Providence Agreement or Civil Compact, with Richard Scott’s signature. Rumor is that it’s all in his handwriting. (Providence City Archives). It reads:
August 20, 1637
We whose names are hereunder, desirous to inhabit in the town of Providence, do promise to subject ourselves in active and passive obedience to all such orders or agreements as shall be made for the public good of the body in an orderly way, by the major consent of present inhabitants, masters of families, incorporated together in a Towne fellowship, and others whom they shall admit unto them only in civil things.
[Signed by Richard Scott and twelve others.]
In Providence, the Scotts, along with many other of Anne’s followers from Boston, created a new community. Richard Scott wrote the Providence Compact, which was then signed by each of the 39 heads of household to come to that place. They became Baptists for a while, then Quakers. Then, in 1660, Catherine returned to Boston to protest the punishment of two young Quaker men. For her efforts, she was stripped to the waist and flogged in public. Even though Boston had been unspeakably cruel to her sister 23 years before, Catherine did not hesitate to speak out when she saw the government do something wrong. She was a worthy bearer of her sister Anne’s torch.
Anne herself was afraid to stay in Providence, especially after her husband’s death. Massachusetts had rattled its saber at the Rhode Island settlers, claiming it had the right to govern them, so she fled with her children to Long Island. There, in 1643, she and all but one of her children were murdered by natives. How long might she have lived had she not been run out of Boston? How much more might she have contributed to the ideas of women’s rights and freedom of conscience had she remained in Boston?
Far from being dour, rigid Puritans, Anne and Catherine were firebrands.
Anne Hutchinson is a key figure in the development of religious freedom in the U.S., and in the history of women in ministry. She challenged authority, and she didn’t back down. A monument to her at the Massachusetts State House calls her a “courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration.” She is easily the most famous – and infamous – Englishwoman in colonial American history.
Anne Hutchinson was a freethinker in the truest sense of the word: Dogmatic as she was in her own way, she seriously contemplated her religion, a deity, and the teachings of those who claimed to know, and then she drew conclusions for herself. The conclusion she reached was not the one that was favored in Boston in 1637. Nevertheless, she did not back down. She had the courage of her convictions, and today she is admired and even revered for her steadfastness.
I admire her enormously. Her courage in the face of adversity, her sustained intelligent wit, her sublime sarcasm – right to the face of the most powerful man in Massachusetts! This – this is a woman I can only hope to live up to as I exercise the courage of my own convictions.
Firebrand atheism: an in-home “revival,” with Sam Singleton, Atheist Evangelist, at my house in December 2012.
When I speak up and speak out, when I hold meetings in my home, when I dissent from religion, when I give my time, money, and talents to my community and to issues I care about, I am following the legacy of my heritage. I am doing exactly what my ancestors have done ever since they first came to this continent – and before.
For the 392 years that we’ve been in America, it’s been my family’s tradition to speak up and speak out and to act on our convictions.
And that, Carey Dove, is a very proud heritage, with full knowledge of where our religious freedoms came from, with full knowledge of when they did not exist here, and with full knowledge of what happens when dissent is not allowed – and why it most definitely and wholeheartedly is.
Dear Leaders of all community-minded organizations:
A study released in September by the Center for American Progress determined that as many as half of all homeless people under the age of 25 are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning their sexuality (LGBTQ), and that those numbers probably under-represent the scope of the problem – obtaining accurate demographics on the homeless is quite a challenge.
These numbers are not surprising. Other studies have shown essentially the same thing, and that while LGBTQ adults may focus on issues like marriage equality, their younger counterparts are struggling to find the resources that will let them stay alive. We already know that school-age people perceived by their peers as homosexual are disproportionately targeted for bullying. The suicide rates among LGBTQ teenagers and young adults far outpaces the suicide rate among straight people of the same age.
Little Rock is no different. Currently, the only local shelter that will accept openly homosexual people is Our House, and beds there fill very quickly. Homeless young LGBT people desperately need resources that are less available to them than to any other segment of the Central Arkansas homeless population.
Lucie’s Place exists specifically to meet these needs in Central Arkansas. The mission of Lucie’s Place is to establish a shelter for homeless LGBTQ young adults, ages eighteen to twenty-five. The envisioned shelter will provide a safe home in which these young adults can get their basic needs met while developing skills necessary for independent living. We are a relatively new nonprofit organization, though, and not yet fully operational. We need your help.
We are currently raising funds with the hope of purchasing and maintaining a building that will house several clients as they get stable enough to go out on their own. In addition to the homeless shelter, these young people need meaningful assistance to ensure that they do not remain homeless, and do not become homeless again. This means counseling, employment services, educational and job training opportunities, and other services in addition to basic food, shelter and clothing.
Most of the funding we’ve received so far has come from grants awarded to Lucie’s Place, but fund raising efforts cannot be limited to grants. This is a community problem, and Lucie’s Place needs help from the community.
Lucie’s Place wants to reach out to churches, civic groups, clubs, and any other organization that may have members willing to help. A board member can present an overall vision of Lucie’s Place and explain the organization’s needs. We need assistance in the form of donations, service providers, and volunteers who can contribute their expertise and resources to serve our mission.
When can Lucie’s Place schedule a presentation to the leaders and interested members of your organization?
He told me that there was a TV preacher named Oral Roberts who started every broadcast by saying, “Something GOOD is going to happen to you!” That’s who we would watch. Sure enough, he turned on Oral Roberts, and sure enough, those words came out of the preacher’s mouth the very first thing. As soon as the words were said, Dad switched the channel over to a John Wayne movie.
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