Because my patients here in San Francisco are, well, here in San Francisco, it is not uncommon for them to include politics in their relational issues with families of origin. Quite understandably, they assume that they are good people, on the side of the angels of tolerance and open-mindedness, and that their benighted relatives are somehow possessed by the dark demons of the Right Wing, "against" many of the values and structures that my patients identify with. Because they identify with these values and stances (and people), they experience their kinfolk's disagreement as threatening and inimical to their way of life, even of their existence.
Fair enough. But because they unthinkingly cast themselves as the underdog victims in the scenario, it never occurs to them that their families might find them just as threatening and inimical. They always start out assuming that their genetic opponents act out of mere selfishness or spite or from self-imposed ignorance, that is, that they are fearful, spiteful and mean. For no reason at all.
I mean no disrespect to the people I work with --because I like them-- but that is an adolescent attitude. A perhaps unavoidable stage, but not one you want to set up house in. With regret, I think of it as the Armistead Maupin syndrome.
Because my work is therapy, not politics, I only address this conflict when it serves the growth of a more conscious relationship with their families. Not to change their voting habits or who their heroes are (no matter how much I disagree) but to help them to realize that their own choices and stances are not without powerful effects in the world and that Mom and Dad may feel as threatened by them as they feel by their parents.
It's easy to believe that people or groups that we perceive as powerful and/or parental are immune to fear. Or have a right to it.
Fair enough. But because they unthinkingly cast themselves as the underdog victims in the scenario, it never occurs to them that their families might find them just as threatening and inimical. They always start out assuming that their genetic opponents act out of mere selfishness or spite or from self-imposed ignorance, that is, that they are fearful, spiteful and mean. For no reason at all.
I mean no disrespect to the people I work with --because I like them-- but that is an adolescent attitude. A perhaps unavoidable stage, but not one you want to set up house in. With regret, I think of it as the Armistead Maupin syndrome.
Because my work is therapy, not politics, I only address this conflict when it serves the growth of a more conscious relationship with their families. Not to change their voting habits or who their heroes are (no matter how much I disagree) but to help them to realize that their own choices and stances are not without powerful effects in the world and that Mom and Dad may feel as threatened by them as they feel by their parents.
It's easy to believe that people or groups that we perceive as powerful and/or parental are immune to fear. Or have a right to it.
1 comment:
It's really the United Church of Canada syndrome that is at fault.
1. Thou shalt affirm and bless gay partnerships as you would man-woman partnerships since the essence is the same. Gay partnerships are equally grace-giving and flaw'd, equally life enhancing and dysfunctional, equally sex-obsess'd and sexually bless'd, equally materialistic and spiritual, as hetero partnerships. No substantive changes are involved in affirming gay sexuality and gay marriage: marriage is simply evolving into more inclusive
2. Gay partnerships are also part of the necessary and socially just project to destroy any and all gender expectations and roles, as part of the general critical theory relegation of western Christianity and its aftermath to the garbage heap that western Christianity so totally deserves. If there's something about a son's or daughter's gay or lesbian partnership that makes you feel "threaten'd" what does that say about your level of commitment to social justice for all God's children?
When one resists gay marriage etc -- the normalization of what is already a totally normal pattern of human sexual relating -- one is confronted with the insistence that there's no big change involved.
When one is ready to accept the gay version of heteronormative marriage, but refuses to accept that one must have one's entire sense of manhood and womanhood changed into a post-gender whatever, one is browbeaten for supporting capitalist sexism, racist militarism, etc.
Example: gay marriage is a no big deal extension of bourgeois recognition to untraditional sexuo-personal relationships. And then the mayor of Toronto is condemn'd for refusing to attend and thus join in the Gay Pride parade. (The assembled 'dignitaries' are fired upon by big water guns wielded by queans in leather etc. Gratitude is obligatyory. Why isn't the Moderator of the United Church of Canada standing on the platform too, eager for the spray?)
But if one says that the routine extension of routine civil benefits to gay and lesbian partnerships qua marriages is part of a cultural project to normalize Canaanite sexuality, one is condemn'd as a bigot and hater.
So the whole campaign against "hate" is simply a detour to the imposition of conservative morals in the forground but by a traditionalism free from biblical revelation's naming system. In other words, the UCCan et al couldn't care less about the effeminate boy mock'd into self-loathing. "Concern" for him is a way of removing the Bible from the foreground?
And yet Kant says never to use another person totally only as a means, an instrument.
And how guilty they made moronic me feel for my reluctance to read the Bible as they did!
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