Not the First; Not the Last

Savita Hallappanavar is a name everyone should know. A few weeks before the election, a representative from my neighboring district here in Illinois proclaimed that he did not believe that abortions were ever necessary to the life of the mother.

In 2009, abortion doctor George Tiller was shot in the lobby of his church for performing just those kinds of abortions.

And a few days ago, in a hospital in Galway, Ireland, Savita Hallappanavar died, in immense pain, after suffering for days from a preventable infection, an infection that resulted from a miscarried 17 week old pregnancy.

Savita Hallappanavar was 31 years old.

She was a married woman. She worked as a dentist. She and her husband wanted this baby and were looking forward to having a child. But when they came to the hospital because she was experiencing severe back pain, the doctors told her she was miscarrying and would likely lose the pregnancy. Her cervix was dilating and she was losing fluid. Their baby would die. She began to show signs of infection – feverish, she collapsed in the bathroom of her hospital room.

She asked the doctors to terminate. Her husband asked the doctors to terminate. They both wanted to end this doomed pregnancy in the effort to save her life.

The doctors said no.

Whether this was because of Ireland’s strict anti-abortion laws or because of malpractice on the part of a zealous doctor, what we do know is that they were told “This is a Catholic country.”

Translation: “we do not perform abortions.”

Pro-lifers now have Savita Hallappanavar to answer for. And not just her. 47,000 women around the world die each year because of illegal, unsafe abortions. Before Roe v. Wade, entire wings of hospitals were dedicated to women recovering from illnesses resulting from illegal abortions. Women who received these abortions worried about whether they would survive, but knew that a pregnancy may also kill them.

When Roe v. Wade passed, those hospital wings were empty.

I have a good friend who was able to obtain a lifesaving D&E operation a few years ago. Today, she has a lovely daughter, a loving husband, and most importantly, a life. Savita Hallappanavar will never have the opportunity that my friend had, because a doctor’s opinion and a country’s laws trumped her right to be alive.

Savita Hallappanavar’s death is not just another unfortunate circumstance, another unfortunate statistic to be explained away. It has everything to do with life – her life. Her husband’s life. Her right to live was trumped by someone else’s values, someone who had no business making those decisions for her.

There are unnamed thousands across the globe upon whose lives other people’s values are etched, chiseled into the stones of their graves. They are mothers. Sisters. Grandmothers. Family and friends. Graves filled because another person’s values, another person’s god, trumped their life, their medical care, their rights.

Pro-life?

Don't make me gag.

__________________

*Note: Abortion and reproductive health services apply to all people with uteruses, not all of whom identify as women.

The Magical Mystery Of Marriage

I was once told, after I said that I didn’t plan on changing my name if/when I got married and wasn’t all that sure about joint bank accounts, that I am what is destroying America. Huh. And here I thought it was terrible economic decisions, wars paid for by credit card, and an massive and increasing inequality gap.

But nope, women not changing their names so they have an “easy out” from marriage are what’s destroying America.

Congratulations, fellow America-destroyers! I think I should get a cool title, like “DIANNA: DESTROYER OF WORLDS!”

In all seriousness, though, it seems that in Christian America, marriage (particularly straight marriage, but we won’t get into that) is the answer to all society’s ills. Even Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney illumined this philosophy when he argued that marriage is a solution to gun violence and that “broken homes” are what leads people to commit gun violence. He of course stated in this in front of the son of a single mother, The President of the United States.

Indeed, “marriage” as an answer to societal ills isn’t a new phenomenon. Bush 43 was a fan of a welfare program that told women they should get into a stable marriage relationship to solve their financial woes. Rhetoric against marriage equality claims that the gays will destroy marriage, which will destroy society. In the mid-20^th century, when women gained more rights and it made it easier for them to escape from bad marriages, gloom and doom from the religious right proclaimed that society was now going to die. Interracial marriage was, like marriage equality, considered a threat to society because of the same sanctity of marriage rhetoric we see now. Indeed, even some arguments against women’s suffrage, way back in the 19^th century, argued that letting women vote would destroy the one-ness of the family (a man voted for his whole family because he and his wife were one).

Marriage as an answer to society’s ills (and the state of society’s marriages as a microcosm for society’s health) is rhetoric that isn’t anything new. And it’s just as bullshit now as it was then.

Now, I’m not saying that marriage itself is a sham, or that marriage as an institution is bullshit, but that Christians in America have placed marriage on such a pedestal that we can somehow say, unironically, that it is an answer to gun violence. This means we’ve got some serious, serious problems.

As a Christian feminist, I most often see this argument in relationship to premarital sex (mostly defined as anonymous one night stands, though that is not the primary form of sexual relationships even now). If people would just honor marriage and wait until marriage, there’d be fewer divorces, fewer abortions, fewer broken homes, and fewer problems in society! It all comes down to sluts and players not wanting to put a ring on it.

This kind of shallow understanding of the nature of both marriage and of premarital sex does nothing but cause harm. It gives Christians false expectations and ideas about marriage, and invalidates the experiences of those who have had positive sexual experiences outside of marriage.

In its most harmful, it conflates casual sex with sexual violence, as though marriage is the answer to sexual violence. In fact, marriage is often where society sees abundant sexual and physical violence, as a commitment to marriage is often used by an abuser as an excuse to commit and continue abuse. Marriage does not change a misogynist into a loving husband, and signing a piece of paper does not sanctify an unhealthy sexual life.

When we present marriage as a shorthand for committed, healthy relationships, we misunderstand and misrepresent marriage as it exists for many people today. We conflate the ideal with the reality. We turn marriage into a panacea for society’s ills, rather than an institution that is itself filled with broken and sinful people. When we say that marriage is the answer for the "consequences" of casual sex (which Christ and Pop Culture defines here as rape and babies), we erase the experiences of numerous married women who still fear pregnancy and numerous married women who have experienced rape from their husbands.

Presenting marriage as an answer to a broken sexual system does not go nearly deep enough. Fundamentally, it starts from the premise that commitment is what matters about sex, not consent, not a good partner, not healthy attitudes. It asks the wrong questions - we need not ask "why aren't people committing?" but "why aren't people having sex in healthy ways?"

What I’m saying here is not that sex without commitment is inherently healthy, but that commitment is not the only thing that has the ability to foster a healthy sexual life. We need to stop presenting marriage both as shorthand for committed sexual activity and as the solution for unhealthy sexual activities. We need to change the conversation from marriage vs. not marriage to “What is healthy? What does consent look like? What does readiness for sex look like? How do you communicate and talk about sex with your partner? How do you bring up problems about sex with your partner?” It is only after we have asked what healthy sexuality looks like – absent of labels like “casual” or “marital” – that we can begin to discuss how marriage is the fulfillment of that healthy sexuality for some people.

What we don’t need is an emphasis on marriage as an answer for society’s problems, but a conversation about why we view certain things as problems in the first place. It is only then that we can begin to make more cogent, philosophical and understandable arguments without resorting to dubbing others destroyers of society. Marriage isn't magic, and neither am I.

Privilege: Checking the Blind Spot

[This is part two of a three part series on privilege. See part 1 here.] A couple of months ago, I was driving through Indiana on my way to Grand Rapids, MI, for work. I’m a good driver, but I do tend to take some risks (don’t tell my insurance company!). When I’m on the freeway, I do my best to get out of big groups of cars because it’s a dangerous place to be. That, ironically, can sometimes mean that I weave through traffic.

On this trip, I was quickly changing lanes through the traffic and moving over to the leftmost (and fastest) lane. I glanced over my shoulder, saw no one, and started moving.

Suddenly there was a loud honk. As I swung the wheel back into my original lane, I saw a Jeep Cherokee swerving to get back into her lane. She had been right in my blind spot. And, boy, was she angry. Understandably so, because I’d nearly caused a major accident in the middle of rush hour traffic. I was shaken up, too, and, for a short time, angry. “What was she doing hanging out in my blind spot like that? Doesn’t she know I can’t see there!?”

Privilege is like that blind spot. Most of us know, in some ways, that it’s there, but we often don’t realize the extent to which it affects our vision. And if we’re not careful about it, we’ll end up running someone else off the road – or worse. It can also be really frustrating to realize that something was in your blind spot and that you almost hurt them (or did hurt them, as the case may be).

Being called out – the metaphorical car horn - sucks. It does – it sucks to realize you made an egregious error. It sucks to be going along seemingly without issue and then suddenly have something unexpected happen that it is entirely your fault.

But it sucks even more to be the person who was in the blind spot, the person who now has had their life threatened by you not being careful. No matter how offended you may be that they honked at you, they’re probably in the right. They can see their position and yours better through their experience, and you need to trust that they see something you don’t.

Additionally, it’s not their job to educate you on what you did wrong. Ideally, you already know or realized it as soon as they said something. When I tried to change lanes and the lady honked, I realized that I probably should have been more careful in checking my blind spot on that side. It is not the job of the person who honks to make sure that I know exactly what I did wrong – she can’t be pulling over every car that causes a problem and giving them a refresher in Driver’s Education.

Likewise, the person you offended and hurt when you spoke from a place of privilege doesn’t have a responsibility to explain to you why what you did was wrong. Most of the time, they’ve got other crap to do and don’t have time to re-explain your blind spots to you.

Sometimes, you’ll be lucky enough to have someone who will pull over with you and tell you exactly what you did wrong. Treasure those moments and recognize that they are doing something they have zero obligation to do. But often, that won’t be the case. It will be your responsibility to figure out where that blind spot is and reexamine what you did or said.

So please, don’t be that guy who is driving as though he owns the road and he’s the only driver on it. There are all sorts of different vehicles and vantage points out there, and if you’re not careful about looking for and understanding how their view is different, you’re going to run somebody over.

And I think that’s the end of that metaphor. Tomorrow, we discuss being the vehicle that’s in the blind spot.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

Quit Your Job

Because of my recent bout of being internetless, I’ve missed a lot of important news – I didn’t hear about the attack in Libya until this morning, and had to do a lot of reading back over things to gain context. The attack was a tragedy and not just because an American state official died. The inevitable and heavily disappointing part of any such tragedy is, of course, the immediate jumps toward politicization and spin. Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is currently taking a lot of heat for tone deaf and politicized comments in the wake of the tragedy, as is to be expected.

But I’m not here to write about that. I honestly don’t know enough context for what happened or for Romney’s remarks to comment adequately on that particular situation. What I am here to comment on is the layperson’s assessment, particularly that of people in the church.

There is a disturbing, intensely vocal portion of the American evangelical church that seems to take its cue for Godliness and Christian service much more from nationalism than from Biblical precedent. And this is no more apparent than when engaged in a discussion about “the Muslims” and issues in the Middle East. All too often, Islam – a religion comprised of literally millions of people across the globe – will be first discussed as a monolith, and then railed against as “violent” and “savage.” There is a faction of the American church will react with little surprise to attacks like the ones in Libya, saying things like, “Well, what did you expect from such people?”

For some reason unbeknownst to even myself, I usually react to such comments with a sigh and a resignation of “Okay, never talking to that person.” I think, quite often, it has been easier for me to write off this section of the American Christian population as “fringe,” as those whom it is better to ignore than attempt to engage in good faith.

But then, today, my friend Alan Noble who writes for Christ and Pop Culture posted a link on Facebook to an analysis of the Libya attacks, prompting the following comment from a person on his friend list:

I say...bring ALL our troops home and let those savage people do what they do best. KILL one another. There are not a million Muslims worth the life of one American soldier.

Upon clicking on this person’s profile, one discovers that he is the pastor of a Baptist church in Arkansas.

Something within me broke.

Up until this point, I could reasonably (though unjustifiably) go on in pretending ignorance that the anti-Muslim sector of Christians in America were just laypeople, uneducated and fringe. But no, here was irrefutable proof that some pastors – shepherds of the flock, people who are supposed to be held to higher standard – were espousing the same racist, Islamophobic trash that I was seeing from commenters on The National Review Online. I suppose that this tripe had to be coming from somewhere, but now I had a pastor saying, directly, in a public forum, that some lives are worth more than others.

And that makes me angry. Very angry.

I have a message to every pastor and pastor-in-training out there: if you think that some lives are worth more than others, you need to quit your job. Immediately.

Don’t take a day to pray about it; don’t spend time waffling about whether or not it’s God’s will. If you, in any inkling in the back of your brain, can possibly think that some lives in this world are worth more than others – because of their skin color, religious beliefs, clothing, or country of origin – you are not fit to be leading God’s flock.

Quit. Now.

You are the malignant tumor on the Body of Christ. If you can possibly say that God cares about some people more than others – which is what you are saying when you say that someone’s life is “worth more” – you are not fit for the role you are in. Take your severance pay, contact your deacons, and turn in your resignation.

In orthodox Christianity, we preach a Jesus who died for ALL. We preach a Jesus who spoke to the lowest of society and welcomed them in before those who most “deserved” his attention – the Pharisees and religious leaders. We worship a Jesus who preached about the goodness of those outside his religious traditions – the Good Samaritan, for example.

If you as a pastor can claim that Jesus with one breath on a Sunday morning, and then say that Muslims are not worth the life of an American soldier on Wednesday, you have failed, utterly and completely to fulfill your duty as a Christian leader. There is no grace and mercy in the claim that some lives are worth more than others; there is no love there, and love, grace, and mercy are essential to Christian leadership. You are damaging people and  you are damaging the Word of God if you can possibly say what this pastor said.

I have hope that you will learn and change and see that the grace, love and mercy of God extends beyond your circle of "people who look like you." But I refuse to tolerate this possible change and growth as a reason to allow you to keep a pastorate. This is a change and growth that must be done away and outside of a leadership position. Asking you to step down is the most gracious thing I can think of right now, as I believe your views can change. But I will not have you wreaking havoc on the trusting people of your church and spreading malignant, terrible lies in the process.

So here is your pink slip. You're done.

Real Dating Advice

So, I spend a lot of time railing against the terrible dating advice that Christian ministries often give. This is because it's often heteronormative, based off archaic gender roles, and often, just. plain. bad. And a friend has been urging me to put together what I think some good dating advice would be, so I did. This is, naturally, not comprehensive, but it's aimed at Christians trying to recover from all the bad advice that encourages women to be passive and men to be leaders and never the twain shall switch. I am one of those women, and I am currently dating. I'm by no means an expert, but I think I read enough dating advice blogs and bad dating advice (and gone on enough dates) to offer some modicum of useable ideas. So here goes!

1. To steal a phrase from Captain Awkward: Use Your Words. A lot of bad dating advice encourages women to be "mysterious" and allows men to skate on the idea that they don't have feelings. This isn't true - everyone has feelings and ideas and things to contribute to a relationship. Things will be a lot easier for both people in a relationship if communication and using your words is a principle. This applies throughout all processes of dating: from the beginning of the relationship, to the decision to be exclusive, to the proposal, to the marriage (which may or may not be your end goal). Using one's words can not only help your partner understand where you're coming from, but can encourage open and honest communication when things get tough and complicated, as they inevitably do.

By "Use Your Words," I mean that you put into words how you feel. Don't expect the other person to "just understand," and if something is wrong, voice it. This also goes for asking people out (I've almost always been the one to do the asking, so let's just nip the "man does the asking" thing in the bud right now, shall we?). If you like someone and want to see them in a dating environment, ask them out. It's hard and scary, yes, but after you practice for a while, rejection can, oddly, get a little easier to handle.

2. A first date is not an invitation to marriage. This is an idea that's really tripped me up in the past, partly because in the church, we tend to treat people who are dating as immediately serious and immediately headed for marriage. This type of thinking can put a lot of pressure on a relationship and can destroy it before it starts (this, if I can admit openly and honestly, was the problem with my first ever relationship). We in the Christian community have a tendency to put a lot of importance because "OMG WHAT IF THIS IS THE ONE GOD HAS PLANNED FOR ME?" and let me tell you: thinking like that will more effectively scare off a potential person than almost anything else (besides, I guess, talking about how much you love stabbing things on a first date).

Take off the pressure. Don't go into a date thinking "this could be the one God has for me!" and instead approach it as "you are a cool person. I think I may like you. Let's hang out." Making dating fun, rather than a pressure filled race to the altar.

3. If your potential partner judges you based on your sexual history or lack thereof, they are not worth dating. I've spoken to a lot of straight women who tell me they can no longer date in the Christian realm because there's a lot of pressure to be virginal and pure and they're not, so a lot of guys reject them out of hand. But here's the thing: if someone holds a decision you made before you met them against you, they're not seeing you as a person, but rather as a set of histories. I know this is controversial, but your sexual history does not mean you are a damaged or sullied person. If your partner rejects you because of your past, then they don't respect you enough to try and understand you. They are looking for a set of ideals, not a human being.

And here's the twist to that: this same advice goes for virgins! If someone you're dating shames you for being a virgin, then they are letting their expectations of you rule over who you actually are. For example, I went on a date with a dude back in the spring and somehow sex came up in the conversation. I ended up explaining about my virginity. His reaction was "But, dude! No, I don't believe that! Someone as awesome as you? Noooo, sex is awesome! You should totally get on that!" Instead of my lack of history being respected and understood, he instead shamed me for not being more experienced.

If a person does that to you, no matter your history, that's a red flag.

4. You don't owe anyone anything in a relationship, especially not access to your body. This is the point that's probably going to cause the most controversy, as a lot of Christians have the belief that "my body belongs to my husband and I to him." And I'm telling you here: your body is yours. Your partner does not own you, and you do not own them. Consent is mandatory, and especially important to remember in a dating relationship. You do not owe them sex if they bought you dinner; they do not have a right to touch you if you do not want to be touched. It is a basic level of respect that all dating relationships should maintain, and if your date does not respect those lines, then they do not respect you.

I think I've told this story before, but my first kiss happened when the boy I was dating turned to me and said, "Okay, this is awkward, but can I kiss you?" Readers, I was over the moon. We get this image that literally grabbing a person and sweeping them up into a big fat kiss is romantic, but, honey, it's so much sexier to just ask, because respect and consent are sexy.

5. Be yourself and find ways to date that work with that. If you're an introvert, this may mean online dating (which is a little bit of a minefield sometimes, but it can also be fun and low-risk). If you're an extrovert, maybe meeting people out in public or whatever works (but keep in mind your environment and their comfort level with you). Basically, what this boils down to is "don't lie about yourself to get a date." For some reason, in the Christian world, women especially get a lot of advice to be passive and mysterious in order to give the guy a chase. I'm here to say, that's bullshit. Not all guys want a chase, not all women want to be pursued (and hell, not all relationships are guy-girl!). If you're more comfortable doing the asking, do it (that's mainly directed at the heterosexual women in the group). God's not going to smite you dead because you gave your number to someone at a coffee shop. Remember that you're dating to get to know a person, not a set of gender roles, so don't let worries about who does what interfere.

6. Talk about the big things. This may seem to contradict my point two, but it's not - talking about the big things doesn't mean you start planning your wedding at date one, but dating is supposed to be an exercise for figuring out whether or not someone fits into your life for the long term. It's not good to date someone for a long time and then discover that you're not compatible in a very important area, like wanting or not wanting kids, or having a certain sexual kink, or whatever. Talk about kids. Talk about sex. Talk about travel.

This, of course, doesn't mean you have a list of interview questions that you go through on the first date and hope to tick off all the right boxes, but once a dating couple starts heading toward a more serious relationship, discussing those big things is very, very vital to the health of the relationship.

And I'm going to add here that you need to talk about sex, even if you're waiting until marriage. What are your expectations? What forms of protection would you like to use? How do you orgasm (many cis-women don't orgasm from traditional penetrative sex)? What counts as "sex" for you? How do you feel about giving or receiving oral? Have you been tested for STDs and are you clean? After all, you plan on having sex with this person, right? It's probably important to know what their views are about bedroom activities before you actually get to the bedroom. (And if they at all resemble Doug Wilson's, run far, far away).

7. Don't be afraid to seek outside advice. This is actually something I need to do more, though I'm getting better at it. Talk to not only your married friends but your friends who are dating. While the relationship can only really be decided by the two of you, having outside input is never bad. Christian dating advice would phrase this as accountability, but that usually means a chaperone on a bowling date or whatever. Instead, what I mean by it is to have people outside the two of you. You should never be at a point where you have no one else to talk to about problems in your relationship - you should always have outside friends and family who know you and to whom you can go vent. It's healthy to have someone other than your partner to share things with, especially as an outside perspective can help solve an issue both of you were too close to see an answer to.

So there you have it. Feel free to add your own advice in the comments! Many thanks to somaticstrength, Ally Clendineng, and Sarah Moon for helping me with this list!

In Boxes: Why Christian Dating Advice Sucks

In the course of my research, I’m spending a lot of time reading Christian Dating Advice books and blogs and posts by churches. I’m positively inundated with messages about how dating relationships are supposed to look and do and be like. There was a time when I would have gobbled up this advice, especially the kind that told me all I had to do was wait and he would come, Field of Dreams-like. It was practically promised to me that if I concentrated on God, if I became a good godly woman, then Christian men would positively flock to me! It had to work!

After all, if you’re a woman, and you’re actively looking and seeking out a mate – no matter what age you are – then you’re not focusing on God and letting him in his sovereignty bring a guy into your life! I mean, Mark Driscoll’s online church ministry, The Resurgence, says as much:

Submission is not only for wives. God asks for a submitted heart now, one that trusts in his provision and plan for your life, including dating. Ultimately, dating, and all of life, is about submission—waiting and trusting God and saying as Jesus does, “Not my will but yours be done.”

This does not, however, leave you helpless, hopeless, and hamstrung in the relationship department. A godly woman can express friendly interest in a brother in Christ.

• It is OK to mingle—but don’t manipulate.
• Peruse—but don’t pursue. Let him initiate.
• Take notice of the godly men serving Jesus around you—but never stalk. It’s creepy.
• Cross paths with a man who interests you—but don’t tackle him.

You see, as a woman, I’m only allowed little subtleties, passive interaction. If I attempt to take the lead, then I’m somehow sinning and not submitting. A woman who takes the lead is a signal to Godly Christian Men ™ that she’ll have trouble submitting to you in marriage (beware the whores!).

The Resurgence’s tips for dating for guys say as much – take the lead, be intentional, etc. The woman in the advice is merely a placeholder, someone who can be rotated out. Notice that in the advice for what to say in a relationship, asking what the woman thinks is never a part of it. From the first point, it advises a forceful approach: “I’d like to take you out a date.” Not, “Would you like to go out with me sometime?” or even “Would you like to have coffee with me?”

From the first interaction, the woman does appear to have a say. Sure, she could say no to “I’d like to take you out on a date,” but the language advised there does not help men develop an attitude in which the woman and her will are considered. It is presumed that, if you say things intentionally, then she won’t say no. And hey, since she’s a passive woman just waiting for you to ask her out, you, as the man, have every expectation that she would say yes, because you’re the leader.

Some of this advice can be useful – being honest and open about your intentions is important for BOTH sides of a dating relationship. But the way this advice tells men to approach relationships elides the will or even humanness of the woman they’re supposed to be dating.

That, ultimately, is at the center of my problem with most Christian dating advice: not only does it quite frequently encourage passivity on the part of the woman, but it quite often – in a good-faith attempt to get men to be more confident – dehumanizes the role the woman plays in a relationship.

I am not a passive woman upon whom a man can expect to say things and have me follow along. I am an active partner, with a life, a genuine humanity, and life goals and dreams that aren’t going to be dropped because some man says jump. But that’s what Christian dating advice frequently commands – be prepared for him to lead, let him take the lead, your life is the one that’s going to change, etc. etc.

Sorry, dating advisers: I’m not a “follower” just because I’m a heterosexual woman. When you forget the unique nuance that characterizes every single relationship – the way different personalities come together and the ways different people interact – your advice rings hollow and dehumanizes both men and women.

Some men don’t lead, and some women don’t follow. The boxes you put men and women and their God into are more harmful than whatever worldly influence you can imagine.

On Unsolicited Advice and the Single Life

Hello. My name is Dianna Anderson, and I’m single.

[Hi, Dianna.]

Nice to meet you.

I’ve had one boyfriend in my life, one brief fling, and can still count the number of dates I’ve had on one hand. I have tried online dating. I have tried giving my number to the cute boy in a coffee shop (thus the “fling”), and dating people from my friend group. The last turned into my first and only relationship, which lasted all of 2 months, 2 weeks, and five days. We were just a few days short of a three month benchmark when he decided that he couldn’t do long distance.

Prior to that relationship, I’d had one (blind) date with a guy, and had been asked out a total of two times.

My experience is not outside the norm.

Nice to meet you: I am a representative single person in the church.

Here’s the deal: A lot of us are getting tired of “the look.”

You know the one: when you tell someone in your church or your social circle that you’re single, and they give you this pitiful-I-wish-you-could-be-married-like-me-because-marriage-is-awesome-and-now-I’m-reviewing-all-the-single-people-I-know-to-possibly-set-you-up look. Marrieds may not even realize that they’re giving this look – they’ve been married so long that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be on the receiving end, and they probably don’t even realize they’re doing it.

But oh, what a look it is.

And following the look comes the advice. You know, it’s been a while since they’ve been out of the dating pool, but they managed to find someone, so this advice probably still works, right? Nevermind that they met their husband when they were 19 and sat next to each other in a class, and you're 26 and out of school. Nevermind that their wife was part of their friend group for a number of years before he asked her out, and your local friend group consists of married coworkers. Nevermind that they’ve never gone on a blind date, had to play the dating game, or given their number to a stranger in hopes that they won’t end up dead later.

And we all know the advice.

The advice that says, “When you stop looking, you’ll find someone!”

The advice that tells you to “dance with Jesus, and he’ll let the right man cut in!”

The advice that says be passive, wait, it’ll happen when it happens, don’t try too hard, don’t go looking for love, wait for the other person to act.

This? Is terrible advice for the current crop of singles in the church.

Being passive may work when you’re on a college campus surrounded by single people. Stopping looking may work when you’re surrounded by tons of eligible single people.

None of this works when you’re in your mid-twenties, still single, and the only single person in your current social circle. None of the advice that the church gave me in order to “protect my heart” actually helps me to be proactive in finding a relationship. It has, in fact, equipped me to make bad decisions because I have no idea how to handle a casual dating relationship, and can’t navigate the “do I text him first or does he text me or do we do phone calls or whatever how do I even get out of a bad date?”

The church that has “kissed dating goodbye” is now attempting to welcome it back with a barrage of late night texts made after downing an entire bottle of wine. The church, as an institution, has place such an emphasis on the marriage relationship being "what a Christian does," that it no longer knows what to do with actual single people who are dating, especially if these single people are older than college age.

And I mean actual dating, not “Hey, I asked you out, we went out once, and now you’re my partner for all of time.” That’s a relationship. Dating is meeting a guy for coffee in the hopes that you’ll spark some sort of connection and explore the possibility of a relationship in the future. And the church, in particular, has done a really bad job of equipping men and women for such situations.

Here’s the thing: Dating isn’t passive. Dating requires that you continually examine yourself – not just so you can play the game, but so you can make decisions about who you want to spend your time on. It requires you to be deliberate and open about your intentions, and to decide how you want to present yourself to the world. It requires you to put yourself out there, knowing you could get hurt, and to develop strategies for dealing with heartbreak - not merely avoiding heartbreak altogether. Dating forces you to wrestle with and improve your own interpersonal skills, and recognize your own limits. It compels you to look at yourself and examine how you connect with people – a lot of different people! – and learn all the little ways in which people have different quirks and tendencies. It teaches you to develop radar for red flags and dealbreakers. It gives you an appreciation for a vast swath of human experience – and yes, introduces you to some real…bozos.*

And it gives you a hell of a lot of great stories.**

Basically, my point is this: the singles in your life and in your church know you have good intentions for them. We do; we understand. And if you feel that there is a specific situation for which your advice as a married person would work, then by all means, speak into that situation. But if we’re not asking, don’t be telling.

Actually listen to what the single people in your life are telling you. I assure you, if we are looking for advice, we will say that we are, usually with an “I don’t know what to do,” or, more pointedly, “What do you think I should do?” Let us make mistakes, let us make bad decisions, let us do things you would not have done, because that’s how we learn and gain experience. And trust us when we say something’s not working – if I’m not attracted to a guy, I’m not going to continue to date him in the hopes that “something could develop.”***

Allow us to be real people, apart from the search for a partner, and understand that we live different lives than you who are married.

And for pete’s sake, stop saying that “maybe you’re meant to be single!” No one wants to hear that. Ever.

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*Yes, I'm aware that many of these traits can apply to marriage, but there's a difference between figuring out who you are as you grow with one person, and who you are as you meet and get to know a vast swath of people.

**Ask me sometime about my worst date experience, I dare you.

***Puh-leeze stop telling me this. I know very quickly if I'm attracted to a guy, and no amount of getting to know him and spending time with him is going to change the gut reaction.

(One last note: I'm not blaming the church for the fact that I'm still single, as for much of my earlier twenties, I wasn't in a position to have  a relationship. But now that I am dating and exploring my options, I'm finding myself having to ignore so much of what the church taught me about dating because it's just plain wrong. We need serious rethinking on this issue.).

No Longer Sorry

On October 10, 2011, I went through one of the worst Skype calls of my life. My very first boyfriend, who I had been with all of three months, broke up with me. I’d spent almost every day of the past few months with this man, and he was the first person I’d ever said “I love you” to in that way. Naturally, this was an emotional conversation. Naturally, I started crying. And, naturally, I apologized for my reaction in between sobs.

Wait, what?

Yes, that’s right. I apologized to my boyfriend. For crying. While he was dumping me.

It took me weeks to realize how absurd that was. He left me. He broke my heart. If anyone should be apologizing in that situation, it’s him.*

A few weeks after that, I read a blog post about how women apologize too much, and started to think of absurd times that I’ve apologized for stuff. And only then did the absurdity of my apology hit me full force. Hell, to be honest, it was wrong of me.

But there was something within me that made me apologize for having an emotional reaction. There was something inside me that said any sort of emotional outburst is instantly inappropriate and I should do something to indicate that I recognized how inappropriate it was. There was something internalized that dictated an automatic apology the instant any kind of tears started to flow.

Nevermind that I was alone in my apartment. Nevermind that the person on the other end of the call was five hundred miles away and knew that this sort of reaction was likely. I was having an emotional reaction, and I automatically thought of this reaction as inappropriate.

And that’s messed up.

In writing my post last week, I couldn’t help but think of all the ways I’ve internalized this apologetic meme. I used to apologize for giving my opinion. I even employ the sarcastic, “I’m sorry, but this is how it is” on occasion. I apologized to anyone who would listen for crying when my father’s wallet was stolen in Rome. I apologized in situations where I wasn’t actually sorry but felt the need to excuse my own emotions. When I get upset over something, the first words on my lips are usually “I’m sorry.”

So I’m going to stop. I’m going to stop apologizing for feeling emotions. I’m going to stop apologizing for having a perfectly legitimate reaction to bad news.

Last week, I had to tell my boss that I’m canceling my planned trip to Scotland this May due to a mix up at the IRS which prevented me from getting the tax refund I needed. I choked back a sob and, in the same instant, an apology for crying at work. Why? I'd been looking forward to this trip for ages. Why was I apologizing for being sad about canceling it?

I don’t know why I apologize so much, but I do know it is a weakness. I needn’t apologize for having a legitimate emotional reaction to events in my life. Apologizing for my tears seems to be another way of apologizing for being human.

Apologies, in some circumstances are appropriate. Yelling and destroying things in anger is something that requires an apology. Crying when something bad happens, though? Nope.

Apologizing as though emotions themselves are inappropriate is unhealthy. So I’m saying “goodbye” to saying “sorry.” Join me.

_____

*To his credit, he did start the conversation with “I’m sorry, but…” and he handled the break-up and my reaction in a relatively mature manner. But during that hard conversation, I was the one who was apologizing profusely and frequently.

The Freedom to Choose

This week, there’s been a faux-controversy about some comments made by Democratic political consultant Hilary Rosen, saying that Ann Romney, as a stay at home mom, has “never worked a day in her life.” Naturally, this stoked a lot of the fires of stereotypes about feminist leftists in that, evidently, we view SAHMs as lazy, good for nothings, who just sit at home and eat bon-bons all day.

Unfortunately, this view is complete fiction, on multiple levels. It’s a fiction that this is how feminists view SAHMs – made almost funny by the fact that I know quite a few feminists who are the stay at home parent. And it’s a fiction that Rosen’s comments were a dig at stay at home mom’s in general. And it's a fiction that stay at home moms don't work hard.

Here’s the full context of Rosen’s statement:

What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues. And when I listen to my wife, that’s what I’m hearing.

Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we—why do we worry about their future? [emphasis mine]

Rosen’s point is a political one – the Romneys are very well off.* Everyone knows that. We’ve been laughing for months at how Romney is so rich he’s unable to relate to the average middle class person he’s representing. And Ann Romney – who “drives a couple of Cadillacs” – is, as Rosen was pointing out, in a situation that allows her to be a stay at home mom without worry about finances, job loss, or how to pay for day care if she chose to work. Fundamentally, Ann Romney was lucky enough to have the choice about being a stay at home mom.

As a childfree person, happily so by choice, I fundamentally support the rights of mothers to have choices in how they parent and whether they work or not. Just as my hackles get raised when someone suggests that it’s my duty to stay at home and raise children, I understand that SAHMs feel like they get a negative rap, and feel the need to push back against the "working woman’s feminism."**

But here’s the thing: Feminism is fundamentally about choice. When we take away a woman’s choice to work or to be a stay at home mom - be it through economic or religious means - we take away a fundamental part of her dignity and humanity. The free will to say “This is what I want to do in my life” is a massive part of personal identity and personal dignity, and it is something that women all over the world are denied.

That’s why Ann Romney cannot relate to the single mother who has to work three jobs in order to make ends meet. That’s why Ann Romney cannot relate to the middle class teacher who would like to stay at home but can’t because her state doesn’t pay a high enough salary for her to do so. That’s why Ann Romney cannot relate to the economic woes facing most of middle class America. She’s never had to wonder if her next pay check would be enough to cover a bill. She’s never had an IRS mix up prevent her from taking time off work. She's never had to decide between formula and keeping the lights on another month.

Christopher Hayes is right when he calls the controversy over Rosen’s comments “substance-less idiocy.” No one is arguing that stay at home moms don’t work hard. What many current feminists contend and have contended for years is that there is a systemic problem in the way this government handles women’s issues that prevents women from being stay at home mothers by choice. We are frequently economically unable to choose to work at home because companies don’t offer paid maternity or parental leave, because there’s no security that we would be able to get a job when we return from mothering. Additionally, the wage gap favors men as breadwinners. Making the decision to leave the workforce or to have a baby impacts women much more negatively in terms of career advancement than it ever does men.

We live in a culture that values neither the career women nor the stay at home moms. Because women live lives that are considered public property, to be legislated and debated and discussed, rather than merely lived, there’s not a woman in the United States who is not facing criticism for her choices.

The point is neither here nor there when it comes to whether or not stay at home moms work. The point is that women need to have the choice – economically, socially, religiously, and physically – to be a stay at home mom if they want to be, and to be a childfree career woman if they want to be. The freedom to choose one's path in life is fundamentally American. To deny the economic reality that takes the choice away is to create a fiction of epic proportions.

_______

*Understatement of the century, I know.

**The reason many have this impression is because of second wave feminism of the 50s/60s, which pushed back against the idea that women should be housewives and that was our station in life. Last May, the NY Times had an interesting article explaining that part of the reason there was a backlash against housewifery and being a stay at home mom was not because feminists are secretly sexists who hate mothers. Rather, Coontz writes: “In the early 20th century, under the influence of Freudianism, Americans began to view public avowals of “Mother Love” as unmanly and redefine what used to be called “uplifting encouragement” as nagging. By the 1940s, educators, psychiatrists and popular opinion-makers were assailing the idealization of mothers; in their view, women should stop seeing themselves as guardians of societal and familial morality and content themselves with being, in the self-deprecating words of so many 1960s homemakers, ‘just a housewife.’” The entire article is worth a read.

Terrorism and Othering

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.” – John Green, Paper Towns

I remember standing in line at an office on a Sunday in 2009, and reading a headline on the TV screen: “Kansas Abortion Doctor George Tiller Killed.” I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I remember being slightly surprised as the headline changed to discuss the location – Dr. Tiller’s church. But that was all that surprised me.

You see, the first headline told me everything I needed to know about the case: “Kansas Abortion Doctor…Killed.” Specifics didn’t matter because there were a number of things I could assume, just from a headline: the man was likely the only provider of abortions in the state, he had probably been harassed for years, and the person who killed him probably had a history of connections with pro-life groups and organizations.

And the story unfolded: Tiller provided late-term abortions, one of three people in the US at the time to do so, and was one of the only people in Kansas to provide abortions at all. And his killer, Scott Roeder, was a man connected at several levels to Operation Rescue, an organization which frequently held protests and vigils outside Tiller’s Wichita office (though Operation Rescue denies any connection to Roeder, he frequently attended meetings and had the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in his car at the time of the shooting).

(For more information about Dr. Tiller’s death, see this excellent documentary narrated by Rachel Maddow for MSNBC).

For me, Dr. Tiller’s death was just another sad chapter in a decades long string of clinic bombings, fires, and assassinations.

The latest came in the form of a failed bomb at a Wisconsin Planned Parenthood on Sunday night – the bomb went off, but burned itself out, causing damage to the building but luckily not injuring any workers as they were not in the clinic on a Sunday night.

This happened just a couple short weeks after Texas State Senator Wendy Davis’ office was set on fire by a man with a Molotov cocktail. Davis was an outspoken supporter of Planned Parenthood who had recently entered the limelight by talking about how Planned Parenthood helped her out as a single, teen mother.

I was born in 1986. In my (relatively short) lifetime, Drs. David Gunn (1993), John Britton (1994), Barnett Slepian (1998) and George Tiller (2009), as well as clinic escort James Barrett [in the same case as David Gunn, above], receptionists Shannon Lowneyand Lee Ann Nichols (all three in 1994), and security guard Robert Sanderson (1998) were all killed for doing their jobs.

In my short 26 years of life, acid has been poured over the entrances of clinics in Miami (1998), clinics have been set on fire (including one in my hometown in 1999, as well as numerous incidents all throughout the 2000s), cars have been literally driven into clinic buildings (Rockford, IL, 2000; Rochester Hills, Michigan, 2006; and St. Paul, MN, 2009) , multiple Molotov cocktails have been lobbed through windows and doors (most recently being the incident at Wendy Davis’ office), and several clinics have been bombed or experienced attempted bombings (most recently in January in Pensacola, FL, excluding the already mentioned incident in Wisconsin on Sunday).

Additionally, numerous pro-life organizations have participated in harassment techniques, publishing the names, addresses, and phone numbers of “abortionists,” encouraging their followers to call them by the hundreds, though the content is up to the individual caller.

And yet, in recent memory (since I started paying attention in 2009), the incidents of bombings, of threats, of attempted arson have been reported as “isolated incidents,” done by “unhinged fringe members” of the pro-life movement – if their connection to pro-life movements is acknowledged at all. Even with a consistent pattern of attacks on Planned Parenthood clinics and Planned Parenthood supporters, each new incident of violence is treated as isolated, as fringe, as not representative of the movement as a whole.

And I’m willing to grant that it’s not representative of the movement to bomb clinics, but the lack of willingness to acknowledge ANY complicity in this form of domestic terrorism smacks of intellectual dishonesty.

I grew up in the pro-life movement. While my parents weren’t the “stand outside the clinic and protest” type, I frequently heard – at church, at school, at home – imprecations of those “sluts” who would “kill their babies.” I listened to my OBGYN uncles rant and rave about the irresponsible ladies who just shouldn’t have sex if they don’t want a baby, and talk about how they urged their patients to have more children (instead of adopting…?). I side-eyed the Planned Parenthood across the street from my high school, thinking bad thoughts about “free condoms” and low cost birth control – because, obviously, that was just enabling the sluts. And I financially supported the local pregnancy crisis center – the Abstinence Clearing House – by wearing a shirt with a cute dog on it reading “Pet Your Dog, Not Your Date.”

And then I met women who had abortions.

They weren’t the irresponsible sluts I’d been raised to revile – they were people who were already mothers, they were college freshmen who had to scrape together the money to pay for the abortion (it goes without saying that they did not have the money to pay for the medical care of a pregnancy, let alone a child), they were women who had taken every precaution they could. They were and are real people, with real, complicated stories and motivations and lives.

And the people who work at the clinics are real people, with real, complicated lives and stories – everyone from the doctor to the nurse to the receptionist in the lobby is a real person, just like you, and just like me.

The rhetoric of the pro-life movement (on the whole) doesn’t seem to think so, though. They like to talk about women who get abortions as “irresponsible,” without ever considering how abortion, in some cases, might just be the responsible move. They like to offer simple solutions, like women simply not having sex in order to avoid pregnancy – a solution that only works in a world where rape and incest are not reality. They like to characterize doctors who provide abortions as “baby-killers,” ignoring the numerous positive efforts they make in providing birth control and the hardship that is life as a doctor who provides abortions.

“I am a good citizen, and I am very real.” – Kurt Vonnegut

I’m not writing this necessarily to implicate the pro-life movement as a whole, or even necessarily to rail on about domestic terrorism,* but merely to point out this: Clinic bombings, terroristic attacks, Molotov cocktails, cars being run into buildings can be pinned down to one thing, and one thing alone: Othering.

We encounter a lot of people in our lives, many of whom we’ll disagree with, and most of us manage to disagree peacefully. But we create a toxic environment, a world that encourages violence, when we Other the people we disagree with – when we make them, in our minds, into something so unlike ourselves that we strip them of their humanity and dignity.

This is what the pro-life movement consistently and successfully does to abortion doctors and to women who get abortions. This is the stuff of hate crimes – when a teenager on the street becomes nothing more than a black kid in a hoodie. This is the lifeblood of a political environment that breeds shootings, and shouting matches, that leads pundits to rip off their mikes and storm off set, that props up figures like Rush Limbaugh and scares off any moderate criticism. Othering is how we get to absurd proclamations like “The entire Tea Party is racist,” or “Liberals are all atheist, god-hating scum,” “The GOP doesn’t care about the poor,” and “Liberalism is a mental disease.”

Othering is a bipartisan problem. However, it most consistently is connected with violence and terrorism within pro-life movement, likely because the stakes are raised so high. It is genuinely believed that they’re preventing a “holocaust,” that “the most dangerous place for a black baby is in the womb” (thereby playing on race war rhetoric), that abortion doctors are “heartless baby-killers.” Rather than being halted and questioned and asked to be more nuanced, the most flagrant mongers of this hateful rhetoric are encouraged, celebrated and awarded (think of the vans that drive around cities showing pictures of “aborted”** fetuses on the sides).

And then, when a bomb goes off at a clinic, when an abortion doctor is shot in the back of the head while standing in his church lobby, when a clinic is vandalized and bricks are thrown through windows, when a clinic escort is assaulted walking into work – all of these things extend from the ongoing and sustained practice of Othering.

I don’t have any practical solutions, other than to remind you to rebuke those in your life who Other people. Remind them that everyone has a story, that your enemies are men like you. And, little by little, we’ll regain some of the dignity necessary for civil discourse.

*I say terrorism because these attacks are the definition of terrorism – a violent attack meant to send the message to others in a community that they are in danger.

**This pictures are most often actually medical pictures of stillborn babies, not abortions as the campaigns frequently claim (warning: link contains graphic content).

UPDATE: It has been confirmed that the man who bombed the Wisconsin Planned Parenthood clinic on Sunday night was doing so explicitly as an anti-abortion move. He is quoted as asking the judge in his arraignment if the judge knew "how many babies were being killed in that clinic." "Baby killer" as Othering functions well in this situation.