To be honest, I don't recall my folks discussing politics around the dinner table. I was too young to vote during the Nixon elections, but I remember being obsessed with the House impeachment hearings being televised. I was watching into the late evenings on a small black-and-white in the living room. My folks showed zero interest and had already turned in. The sound of the TV was irritating my Dad, whom no doubt had work in the morning, and he yelled out to me to turn it off and go to sleep. I pleaded just a few minutes more; he was in no mood to argue. He got up and flipped the circuit breaker. I initially thought we had a weird power outage (no storms in the area); my folks didn't seem all that concerned.
My mom's family was a rare Massachusetts Republican family; my grandfather and his dad had built a small grocery; he operated the grocery with his brother, whose wife ironically was one of my Dad's aunts. The grocery went out of business while I was in junior high; my Mom's sibling is a priest, and my grand-uncle had no dependents to pass the business on. My Grandfather was a news fanatic; he watched two of the national newscasts each evening (staggered schedule) (I went to visit him during college Christmas break while my folks were in Germany). I only recall one political discussion; one day for some unknown reason he gave me an impassioned lecture against abortion, apparently not realizing I had been pro-life for years. I felt like saying, "Grandfather, I don't even have a girlfriend yet..." My uncle was/is a staunch conservative (probably more than I have ever been), but he's got a different style than me: he's got better people skills, concisely makes his point, doesn't like to argue or repeat himself and is unflappable. (To a large extent, based on circumstances, I'm similar, but I'm more direct and more likely to debate a point--it's the academic in me.) My Mom is more of a social conservative; she doesn't like the censorship on religious speech in the public arena, and she has low expectations of politicians and public policy. She always manages to surprise me; several months ago, she forwarded me one of Paul Krugman's nonsensical columns that she had gotten from some email correspondent. I snapped back at her effectively, "Why are you sending me this crap? Haven't you read my blog?" She thought it sounded "interesting".
My Mom did get upset at my blog once; it wasn't my discussions of economics, which she usually finds boring. She ironically thought I was promoting the gay lifestyle. There's a difference between tolerance and advocacy. I also believe in religious diversity, although I'm not Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, etc.; that doesn't mean that my Catholic beliefs have been compromised.
Actually, my Mom in practice has been tolerant; of my 6 siblings, 4 of their spouses were non-Catholic (3 have converted well into the course of their marriages), and only one was of French descent. This may not impress a lot of people, but she still takes faith-sharing classes and EWTN is her favorite cable channel; my Dad is still a lay Eucharistic minister.
A lot of the so-called progressive causes (feminism, minority and gay rights, environmentalism) were already in place long before I started college. My Dad enlisted as a teen after the military was already integrated. What I find remarkable is that the younger generation, which has been largely indoctrinated by members of my generation and above, seems to think they've discovered this issue.
I've cited these examples in past posts. A number of GI's serving in Asia meet and marry local women; a few relevant families were part of my parish before I left for college. (I have a cousin whom while in the Marines married an Australian woman.) I befriended a couple of white/Asian married couples while in the UT graduate math program. There were lots of white-Hispanic couples at OLL, including my Vietnam vet RA whom was involved with one of my pretty, petite Latina co-workers, Sally. (I was jealous; I used to tease her she looked like a grown-up version of a doll, and she would throw gross stuff at me.) When I was part of the in-crowd at UH Catholic Newman, I befriended a biracial couple. Jane, a woman of color, was a lead singer for a local Christian group; her husband was a white postal worker. One evening he and I had a conversation, and without my prying, he had mentioned how his parents had essentially cut him out of their lives when he started dating Jane. He always figured that sooner or later they would come to accept and love Jane as his partner in life; Jane was beautiful, upbeat, one of the nicest ladies you would ever meet, a true blessing, and a very talented singer. My friend got teary-eyed as he went on to say that his folks refused to acknowledge the existence of their own grandchildren. He couldn't understand how they had put their own flesh and blood, the boy they raised and loved, below their belief system.
Several years later, one of my favorite nieces had fallen in love with a young man; she had been a consistent Dean's List student, and it looked like her desired admission to the nursing program was a formality. Shortly before the qualification exam she got involved with a new boyfriend. Somehow she barely missed the cutoff score on the qualification exam. At some point later, I was asking her some questions about the relationship (in part, I was concerned about some steamy love letters she posted on the open Internet to her boyfriend), when she started blasting me, saying her father had asked the same questions and it was all because of how the boyfriend looked. First, my siblings or their spouses have never discussed their kids with me other than the normal stuff you might hear in an annual Christmas card, certainly not their dating life. Second, I was stung by how quickly she was questioning my motives. I had occasionally dated women from different racial/ethnic backgrounds; she wouldn't know that, of course; my family only knew about one girl I asked out to dinner, a former college roommate of sister #1.
I had known at least some of my nephews and nieces had Democratic Party leanings since 2008; I was not pushing my point of view on them. I did say I've got a blog out there; if you want to read my opinions, here's the URL. What happened was I got cc'ed on an email to my Mom (using an obsolete email address) which made a vicious personal attack on McCain for his support of embryonic stem cell research. (One-time Democratic Presidential candidate Morris Udall, a political mentor to Congressman McCain, developed severe Parkinson's and McCain's position on the issue, to the left of George W. Bush, reflected his friendship with Udall.) My liberal niece was convinced stem cell research was junk science; it was a confusing rant because Kerry, Obama et al. had been promoting stem cell research like snake oil, with industrial policy preferences, etc. I advised my niece that she was underestimating scientific research and the fact that the Democrats, to the left of McCain, had made it a high-profile issue, using celebrities to promote it. The exchange deteriorated soon thereafter (I started getting crap that looked like it had been copied and pasted from the Daily Kos) and my younger nephew taunting me that I couldn't stop him and his sister from voting for Obama. (No, he was not still in third grade .)
Now I myself had once considered myself "liberal" (by that, I mean center-left; I still consider myself as a "classic liberal", based on individual liberty and free markets), although I was always pro-life and a fiscal hawk. It wasn't until I pursued my MBA that I took classes in economics, and even though the classes were non-political, I became fairly conservative on economic issues and not at all happy with Reagan's deficits.
Still, I figured if I had been stupid enough to have voted for Carter, my nephews and nieces were entitled to similarly waste their votes on Obama. I know for a fact I would never have voted for Obama, even in my salad days, because his stonewalling of the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act materially disqualified him from holding higher office.
Do I regret supporting McCain in 2008? No. I know we wouldn't have had ObamaCare and McCain would never have accepted trillion dollar deficits. McCain would have been far more engaged with Congress than Bush or Obama. Without Obama and the 111th Congress overplaying their hands, the Tea Party may never have spawned.
Yes, I have distanced myself from McCain's neo-con, more proactive foreign policy; I'm not sure when that started; a lot of it had to do with Obama's convoluted Afghanistan surge policy, Obama's escalated drone policy, and a deepening skepticism with Big Government.
Getting back to Generation Next: I explained in yesterday's post how much I disliked Justice Kennedy's obnoxious judgmental tone to those patriots fending off socially experimental policy striking at the very core of our society's bedrock of the institutions of marriage and family. I am not surprised that the next generation has bought into the concept that marriage is a mix-or-match construct--and it's taken over 6000 years in world history for us to suddenly realize it. Never mind gay couples cannot naturally bear their own children--that is, God and/or Mother Nature discriminates against gays!
The talking point about standing in the way of gay people finding love is absurd; the government is not banning gay relationships, commitment ceremonies, etc. Many states have domestic partnerships/civil unions, providing legal protections.
I've also pointed out the talking point of "banning gay marriage" is pure propaganda. There's a difference between banning something and regulating something. For example, if you transfer to another college, some classes may not be recognized. It's not a ban on work from other colleges. In the same way, relationships may not be recognized for a designated status by the government. For example, all the states refuse to recognize polygamous marriages (a key condition for Utah to reach statehood) and adult/child marriages. A state may not necessarily criminalize polygamous marriages, but they may only recognize the original marriage.
The mass media almost universally portrays gays in a sympathetic light and opponents of their special interest agenda as ignorant, bigoted, etc. It is difficult to explain to younger people the concept of unintended consequences. But take, for instance, the social welfare net; nobody really anticipated the declining stability of urban families (particularly African-American); over a third of pregnancies involve unmarried women. The further blurring of the concepts of marriage and family is disconcerting; we are simultaneously dealing with a sexually permissive culture, declining religious influence, latchkey kids, remarried/fused families, etc.
So when a different nephew, raised Catholic, on a social networking site started spouting the same Justice Kennedy-like hypocritical condescending,judgmental politically correct claptrap on the SCOTUS gay "marriage" decisions, I had exhausted my patience. Loosely paraphrased, "instead of regurgitating all the politically correct nonsense trying to impress people with how 'open-minded' you are, why don't you stop and think for yourself?" It did not go over well, just as I intended.
