It's been a busy weekend for the Trop family.
Court and I spent most of Saturday preparing for our
Welcoming Congregation workshop. We were the workshop leaders. We pulled it off, and nicely based on the feedback. It didn't hurt that our contribution to the potluck was an
ice cream cake.
Bribery works.
This morning Court and I did our once quarterly stint in the Sunday School. Court was in the nursery, and I was a special guest with the older elementary kids.
My kids were a restless bunch, but it was time well spent. We talked about the election. We learned about
Olympia Brown, a suffragist who broke many gender barriers in her time. A snippet from the story:
When Olympia Brown was in college, women weren't supposed to wear pants. Women weren't supposed to wear anything except very long dresses that came all the way down to their toes. But Olympia did. She wore dresses that came down only past her knees, and under them, she dared to wear pants!
When it was my turn to talk, I asked the kids what they thought about attitudes toward girls and women back in the day. I shared that when I was in elementary school, girls were not allowed to wear pants to school. We had to wear dresses or skirts. The only exception was on really cold days (meaning below zero), when we could wear pants under a dress or skirt. Then I shared my dread on the day I forgot to wear a skirt over my pants, and how scared I was that the teacher would catch me skirtless. The kids just couldn't believe it.
We did an election, much like on Survivor, where we voted an action figure out of our class. We each selected a toy figure. We named our figures: mine was a big burly sumo wrestler that I named Diaper Dan. He got the most votes in the first round, and was kicked out of the class.
The teacher voted for the Ninja Turtle because he had a weapon "so he must be violent." This wasn't an intentional set up, but it might as well have been.
I was mostly there to talk about the consequences of majority rule, and specifically on the marriage issue. The majority may rule, but that doesn't make the majority right. I talked about how people sometimes cast their vote based on the way a person dresses, the kind of car they drive, what religion they practice, who they have associations with, where they live, how they earn a living, who they marry.
I said that I am married to a woman, and though that is far from usual, it isn't
unusual either. Some people think that marriage is strictly for one man to one woman, and that because I am a woman, I should not be a allowed to marry a woman. Many of these people who oppose my marriage think that I am attacking marriage, because they think I am trying to change it. They fear that changing marriage will damage or destroy it.
Some people think that because I am a lesbian, I am a bad person, or that I do bad things, and that I should not be around children. Some people think that my family (made up of me, my wife and my child) isn't a real family.
I pointed out that the teacher voted off the Ninja Turtle because he had a weapon, and that made her think he was violent. I asked, "What if the Ninja Turtle has a weapon because he is a police officer bravely protecting our safety?" I surprised the teacher and made my point.
People can make a vote for the best of reasons. If a person is violent, I don't want them in my class either. It makes sense to vote for the violent person, to exclude him from the class. Ninja Turtle has a weapon, but is he violent? If he's a police officer, do I really want to vote him out of the class?
I am
Michelle Malkin's worst nightmare: I've exposed vulnerable Sunday School children to my gay agenda.
I think it's a sign of progress, especially where we live, that Courtney has to regularly "come-out" at work.
Just as you feel unjustly scorned, and your own marriage so scorned, by America’s poor performance in marriage, I feel unjustly scorned every time someone says “gay lifestyle.” You aren’t the heterosexual woman, putting her breasts on display for a string of beads at Mardi Gras. I’m not the militant lesbian sporting a mullet, wearing a wife-beater and a chip on her shoulder. I just want to be left alone to care for and support my family, through every legal means, like by providing my own health insurance. I don’t want government to provide it for me. That is the LAST thing I want. But I would appreciate being able to include my wife, my partner, in my insurance package, whatever the price. The problem is, that’s not an option here in Virginia on account of the law. That is, she cannot be included in a FAMILY policy. I want to take care of my family, but the laws make it HARDER for me to be responsible. So we have to buy a family policy to cover me and our daughter. And then we have to buy a single policy to cover my wife.
How does that make sense? How is that consistent with conservative principles like less government interference? And why is that such a threat to society, that I want to be able to provide for my family, so that no one else has to?