-SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR CASTLE, AND YOUR FARM, AND YOUR SIMS. I can’t find my important cartoons and kitty pictures in all this crap.

-So, you’re upset because you might have to pay for a fat junkfood-eater’s health care, but not at all worried that they’ll pay for yours, because flying planes in Alaska isn’t a hazardous job *at all.* And skiing and snowboarding, totally safe and healthy hobbies. Running from the cops on your motorcycle, also a totally healthy and wise decision. We can tell you make good decisions because you’re thin, really.

-[RANDOM STREAM OF PROFANITY]

-Yes, you can totally marry a tree, provided that I get to uproot the tree and beat you with it for making such stupid arguments on my posts. SSM != marrying a plant.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,700 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

My dad always makes a ton of food, because he loves feeding people. And there were no comments about this or that food being “bad” or judgment about who was eating what. Well, we did give my brother a little grief over his love of stuffing, but not in a “You shouldn’t eat that” kind of way. More in a “pass the stuffing to him *last* so the rest of us get some” way. And I ate what I wanted, not to the point of feeling gross or overfull afterwards.

And my mom, when she asked what size I wear for clothing gifts, didn’t say anything negative about the fact that I need a plus size. She just went out and bought me a gorgeous sweater (which I love).

I feel really blessed that my holidays weren’t a weight-related minefield, like so many people’s are.

It made me a little wistful to look at all the old family photos and see myself five, or ten, or twenty years ago. I thought of myself as a fat girl in high school, but when I look at my homecoming pictures, I see someone who’s a pretty average size. Kind of chubby arms, and a round face, but not what you would call fat. Probably wearing a size 14 at the time, so very average. And the pictures of me in college, I’d actually call thin, although I never felt that way at the time.

It’s strange to look at pictures that don’t reflect what felt like reality. But then, it’s not like I manufactured that feeling of “too fat” in my own head. That was what bullies said to me (among other insults, of course) all through later elementary and junior high school. I got called a whale, and all the usual insults. And my parents tried to help me with my “weight problem” and encouraged me when I dieted, and when I lost weight. So even when I wasn’t fat, I was viewed that way. But when I look back at actual pictures, I see a slender child become a chubby young teenager, then an average teen and a slender young woman (who then became an average, then chubby, then fat woman, helped by both regain after dieting and my thyroid throwing in the towel).

It seems like the negative messages are always louder and more prevalent than the positive ones. I’m sure I heard, implicitly or explicitly, that I was fat, or ugly, or weird, or gross, much more often than I heard that I was beautiful, or special, or loveable. Which is not to say that my parents messed up my self-esteem. Heck, my mom always had plenty of positive, encouraging things to say to me–they were just drowned out by the overwhelming onslaught of negative. The fact that I emphasized and magnified the negative and took it to heart, while discarding most of the positive, didn’t help.

I also think this ties into sexism. Our culture spends so much time teaching girls that their only value is a very narrow sort of beauty and that they can never be pretty enough, so of course when you’re told you don’t meet the standard, it hurts worse, and it sticks with you.

I didn’t mean for this to be such a depressing post, because I had a wonderful Christmas and am still having a fantastic vacation. But remembering how much I used to hate myself for not looking the way I thought I was supposed to look, well, it just seems sad. So much wasted time, so much needless pain. And I think that if we could figure out how to build a culture that doesn’t teach people, particularly girls, to hate themselves, that would be pretty awesome.

Being disappointed by the people you look up to, whether they’re real friends and family or celebrities whose work you admire, sucks. I remember being really bummed when Alton Brown started getting really fat-hating, because I love his show and his recipes.

But this has a happy ending. She e-mailed, politely explaining why the line was problematic, and he *agreed with her* and said that he wouldn’t use the line if he performed the poem live.

I love it when people listen, when you get to see your words have a positive impact. It’s easy to get discouraged, because for every one person who takes your message to heart–whatever the message is that you’re trying so hard to get across–there are usually a hundred telling you to shut up and go away. But it’s worth pushing through, because not only do you occasionally plant a seed, you show others that it’s possible to stand up for what they believe in. It’s possible, and it’s worth doing. And oh my gosh did I need that reminder right about now.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote:

Now that that’s* out of the way, I don’t think they’re bigots for believing, in good faith, that homosexuality is a sin. I think they’re bigots for actively fighting against marriage equality and for denying LGBT people the use of their facility.

I think that even if you are fully convinced that homosexuality is a sin, it’s still wrong (and unChristian) to try to continue denying gay people equality under the law. It means real tangible harm and cruelty, like not letting people visit their sick or dying partner in the hospital, or taking kids away from people who’ve raised them. This happens even when the couples in question have seen a lawyer and spent the tons of time and money to get the legal documents that were supposed to be “just as good” as legal marriage. It also means letting kids languish in foster care or group situations when there are adoptive parents who would give them a loving home, but happen to be gay.

The second reason I’m in favor of SSM is that America is not and was never meant to be a theocracy. I also don’t see anything in the Bible to suggest that it’s the job of American Christians to try to make it one. This isn’t Old Testament Israel, where our nation’s laws came straight from God, and nowhere in the New Testament do I find a word about how we’re supposed to force our non-Christian neighbors to live by our beliefs. There’s a lot of turning the other cheek and shaking the dust off your feet and showing love.

And if America wasn’t meant to be a theocracy in 1776, when it was inhabited mostly by Christians and a handful of Jews, how much more wrong would it be to make it a theocracy now when it’s a country of people of every religion and no religion. We’ve been effectively a theocracy in a lot of ways because of a Christian majority and because of some deep-seated prejudices toward people who aren’t Christian, but that’s changing. As a Christian, it makes me happy, not sad, to see that change, because I believe that matters of faith are between an individual and God, not something to be shoved down their throat by whatever majority happens to have power.

I also find it telling which beliefs we feel we have the right, even the imperative, to make others live by. Tons of marriages happen every day that many Christians would define as not Biblical for one reason or another. But we’re not rushing to invalidate the marriages of the divorcees, or the people marrying outside their faith, or the people who have had premarital sex with someone other than the person they’re marrying. Heck, if we want to give all of Paul’s directives about marriage legal force, my marriage to [my husband]** should be just as illegal as the marriage of any two men or two women, because it’s an egalitarian one–I promised to love and honor, but not obey. And on the flip side, there are plenty of Christian denominations that have no problem with same-sex marriage. Even if we were to be a Christian theocracy, whose brand of Christianity gets to be in charge?

Finally, I never said that Chik-Fil-A deserves to go bankrupt and frankly***, if the few bucks I might spend on fast food is going to do in my local chain, they’ve got bigger problems. But I don’t think I’m somehow obligated to have my money go toward things I think are wrong. If it’s okay for Christians who are against homosexuality to boycott Disney for having gay pride days, how is it not okay for me to do the same based on my deeply held beliefs?

I *like* the fact that Chik-Fil-A is closed on Sundays. I like the fact that a lot of the restaurants play Christian music. I would love to be able to support them, but this is an issue that’s important enough to me that I would not feel right eating there.

*”That” was telling him that I didn’t appreciate his sarcasm or condescension. Just because I’m trying to have a better conversation doesn’t mean I won’t tell the other person when they need to knock off the rudeness.

** Hubby’s full name redacted, since this is a public blog and not my “some vague semblance of privacy” Facebook page, where everything I posted is limited to my two-hundred-and-ninety-something “friends”

**He said, among other things, that I was arguing that Chik-Fil-A’s owners are horrible people and deserve to go bankrupt for “acting on what [they] know to be true.”

Proestants and Evangelicals have a curious tendency to make everything about them. This mentality is less prominent in the Catholic, Orthodox, and old Proestant (Lutherans, Anglicans, etc.) communities, but it is unfortunately on the rise in those areas as well. People with this mentality are almost exclusively on the extreme right-wing of the thought spectrum. To them, anyone to the left of Torquemada is not a genuine Christian but an atheistic imposter whose sole mission in life is to spread paganism, secularism, and moral relativism (often with no understanding of what those words mean). Everything in the world is judged according to whether it is for or against Christianity, their Christian denomination, or their idea of what their Christian denomination should be. If anything is not explicitly for Christians, it is automatically assumed to be opposed to Christians.

It took me a long time to realize that, no, it’s not about me, and no, I’m not persecuted. I think the thing that did it was knowing people who actually did experience real religious persecution of the “My landlord saw my altar and kicked me out” variety rather than the “Someone said something mean about my beliefs” variety.

*I’m not sure which of those pronouns to use because I don’t necessarily identify myself as evangelical anymore. Usually I refer to myself as a vaguely liberal Christian of no particular denomination, and I’m not a fan of on the focus on trying to convert everyone around you that is central to evangelism (in that, you know, that’s what the word means). But since that’s the flavor of Christianity I was part of for a very long time, I still kind of identify with it.

Oh, and also, my title comes from this quote from A Wind in the Door. “When we seek our own pleasure as the ultimate good we place ourselves as the center of the universe. A fara or a man or a star has his place in the universe, but nothing created is the center.”

I particularly love this part:

I have been able to be successful, in large part, because my parents were successful. I did something with what I was given, but I was given a huge amount, and to have squandered it would have been criminal. Having done what was expected of me shouldn’t warrant a pat on the back, it was, whether I want to admit it or not, the bare minimum. And to expect someone who wasn’t given a fraction of what I was given to do the same without help is wrong, and it’s senseless.

If you’re a middle class kid, or an upper middle class kid, or a rich kid, you have no right to claim that you got where you got simply because of hard work. You got where you are, at least in part, because of what others did for you, and if you hadn’t been born into a family of people who wanted to and were able to do those things for you, you would have needed someone else to do it.

I know they’ve done studies where people’s sense of how much they’ve eaten varies dramatically based on things like plate size and whether you’re eating out of a big communal bowl (of chips or popcorn, say) or an individual bowl or plate. The thing I have to wonder is how such an experiment would turn out if you controlled for dieting behaviors or an eating competence score. My theory is that the more you focus on external cues, whether that’s a calorie count or the amount of food on your plate, the less attention you pay to your own satiety signals. So, I’m thinking that people who have been doing intuitive eating for a while would be less affected by things like plate size than someone who hasn’t.

Granted, distraction plays a role too. One of the things that I’ve been working on lately is trying to take time at work to just sit and eat, rather than multitasking, especially if I’m eating something particularly filling. Because if I’m just eating and not paying attention, I go past comfortable and straight over to stuffed before I even notice. Though I will say that on the occasions when I do that, it’s a relief to think of it as a learning experience, rather than an “I’ve wrecked my diet and I’m a horrible person” experience. And it doesn’t happen often.

Dude, good for you. First off, really seriously, good for you. If you’re working 30 hours a week in retail or food service, taking a full load of college courses, and pulling off a good GPA, my hat is off to you. That’s an accomplishment, and you have every right to be proud of it.

But where you stop making me think “Go you,” and start wanting you to shut up and go away is where you assume that people who have debt made bad decisions, or were lazy. And where you assume that hard work is the only thing responsible for you being able to graduate debt-free.

First off, you have a job. Lots of people are busting their tails trying to find work and haven’t been able to. So for every college student with your story, there are probably a dozen who can’t get a job at K-Mart or the local pizza joint because they have hundreds of applicants for every position. And you worked while you were in high school? Great. The economy sucked a lot less when you were in high school. Today, a lot of those typical teenage jobs are being filled by twenty-, thirty-, and forty-somethings who can’t get anything else.

Secondly, based on the fact that you’re physically and mentally able to do what you do, I’m guessing you’re in at least decent health. But what would happen if you were injured and couldn’t work for a month? What if you had a disability that made that work and class schedule impossible?

Third, you got scholarships. Yes, you absolutely earned those with your good grades. But there are certainly students who work just as hard, maybe even get the same grades, who don’t get scholarships, or don’t get the same amount of scholarship money you did. And people with awesome grades and scholarships still have student loans. I graduated third in my class, was a National Merit Scholar and had a “full tuition scholarship” (in scare quotes because it didn’t cover increases, so it was only full tuition my freshman year). And yet, here I am, eight years after graduation, still paying on my student loan. Not much, but I am in debt, so by this person’s standard, I fail at life.

If someone has debt, it *might* be because they made poor decisions. It might also be because they made the perfectly reasonable decision to borrow money for something that’s worth it, or at least was when they made the decision. A college education is a prerequisite for a lot of jobs, student loan interest is usually not that high, and college loans can be a good thing. If you can get a job when you get out, that is. It’s a risk, like anything else, but that doesn’t make it a bad decision. Someone starting school four years ago couldn’t have predicted where the economy would be now and how hard it would be to find a job with their degree. And that’s without even taking into consideration how banks can and do misrepresent loan terms or make huge numbers of bad decisions.

A lady I know manages a rental property for a family member, and she was telling me about how stupid she thinks it is that she gets calls from military families wanting to know if she’ll rent to someone with two dogs and three cats. According to her, they shouldn’t have pets, since they know they’re going to move around a lot. It’s irresponsible, poor planning. Sure, if you know you’re moving soon, it’s a bad time to get a dog. But, because someone’s in the military, what, their kids aren’t supposed to have a dog? With all the sacrifices their family is already making? Seriously? Plus, cats and dogs can live ten to fifteen years. How many people stay in the same place that long anymore? Every pet I ever had as a kid was with us through at least one move, and my family hardly moved around at all. SO I guess that means just about everyone is disqualified from having a pet.

Another example showed up in the comments thread of an Alas post on We Are the 99 Percent. The post was about stories of people who have worked hard, saved, been responsible, and still are failing to make ends meet. One commenter decided to nitpick a lot of the posts to turn around and blame them for the problems. They picked the wrong major or spent too much on their degree. Again, sure, it’s good to pick a degree you can actually do something with. But “degree you can do something with” changes all the time, and is based on your skills. (If I’d tortured myself through a comp sci degree, for example, I’d probably be a lousy programmer.) And yet, somehow it’s reasonable to expect people to predict the future, or to magically become good at things they have no aptitude or interest in.

Sure, I get why people do this. If bad things happen to people who *don’t* deserve them, that means you’re not safe either, no matter how well you plan or how smart and how superior you tell yourself you are.