Herban Sprawl

I broke an earring and had been meaning to run it downtown to the jeweler for ages. Since I was going to be around the block today, volunteering at the local campaign office, I decided to pop in and see about the poor thing.

My jeweler is a gem, no pun intended. I mean to tell you, a truly nice guy, and one of those people who always knows the exact right thing to say. I like to tease him about his ability to follow the Episcopalians’ 11th Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Be Tacky, but I think it’s innate with him. I don’t think he could be tacky if he took lessons.

So when a visiting merchant in his establishment asked me about my political buttons (I was just with the twenty-somethings, remember?), I was a little taken aback.

Okay, pick up your jaws. I might write about my ‘a-sordid’ opinions, but I am really, really careful about those with whom I will engage in political discussion. I may have written about it in this space, but I am reticent to discuss abortion - or Sarah Palin’s oddball religious views - and I really do not like to engage in arguments with people who do not agree with my candidates’ points of view.

Call me a big ole chicken, but I’d just rather not argue politics. And I especially don’t want to argue politics with a stranger in front of the guy who selected my engagement stone, puts up with my teasing and whose employees are always as sweet as pie to me. I’ve known him for over twenty years, but I have no idea how he votes and don’t consider it any of my business. He’s a businessman and he has to make a living dealing with people of all political stripes. I would eat lamb rather than put him on the spot. (I despise lamb.)

So there I was. The man wanted to know if I hated Sarah Palin. (Truth: I don’t hate her; I just think she’s the south end of a northbound horse.) I gurgled.
He wanted to know why I don’t like her. (Truth: she belongs to a version of holy roller churches that scare the tar out of me, her husband is a secessionist, she doesn’t believe in abortion, she shoots animals from an airplane, and I’m sick to death of her claim that she’s a regular person. She’s a sham.) I blubbered.
I tried desperately to come up with something palatable without getting into specifics. I was sweating bullets, there, people! I managed to choke out disapproval of her inability to string together coherent sentences, but I didn’t even get that right! Jeweler to the rescue. He interpreted it exactly right, and with the grace and tact that is his hallmark.

The guy pressed me for more and finally, in a last gasp, I just said it. “I disagree with her views on abortion.” Lord have mercy. I didn’t like saying it.

Why? Why would I, who have written about that issue with the same consistent viewpoint, right here in this space, why do I find it so difficult to say that to people I do not know, but who might disagree with me?

I think that Ellen Goodman hit it right when she said that women are very circumspect in discussing this issue. It’s such a controversial issue that many of us are careful about where and with whom we will discuss it. Much the same as outing a gay person, no one wants to out a woman who may have had an abortion. If there women around and the topic comes up among strangers, who in that group might get hurt feelings? Who might inadvertently be put on the spot?

So there I was, a blithering idiot, unable to make my points. Unable to say, lookit here, I was a moderate Republican once upon a time, but then the Republicans sold themselves out to the racists, religious radicals and rich-beyond-rich. The party of Mr. Lincoln is no more. I cannot espouse the same views and be true to my conscience when it comes to social justice. I am a firm believer in the separation of church and state, and unlike the religious right, I have read enough history to know that the founding dads were not uniformly Christian in the same way that they are. They did a lot of praying because they had just embarked upon a political experiment that could sink all of them! It had nothing to do with this being a Christian nation.

Put a pen in my hand, or a keyboard before me, and I can tell you exactly how I feel. Confront me and I blither. I just don’t want to offend anyone, but at this point, I may just have to prepare myself for the inevitable.

An addendum to my friend Esthers’s conundrum (as opposed to corundum!) with the right wingers who had filled her emailbox with their propaganda:

I wound up engaging with a man who, in exasperation, made a perjorative remark about arguing with a Unitarian Universalist that had me chuckling merrily. It was really funny, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean it that way. That I emailed him back and told him thanks and then told him another UU joke probably made him decide I’ve lost my mind. Bless his heart. If he wastes his vote on the Old Fart and the Beauty Tart, that’s his right.