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This weekend, I had a very interesting visit with my parents. They live about an hour from me, so they always enjoy it when we drop off the kids with them for a Saturday and just them have fun. Well, when we came back Saturday afternoon, I was having a conversation with them and they told me something very interesting. They asked me if I knew the date when we were planning on having our youngest son baptized. I told them it would probably be in the Fall, and then they told me that they had stopped going to church altogether.
My parents have been members of, and have attended a Lutheran church for as long as I can remember. Apparently, the ELCA (the official governing body of Lutheran Churches) just had a conference and a vote on whether or not to allow monogamous gays to be ministers in the Lutheran Church. The ELCA voted to allow them to be ministers. I guess the church my parents attend(ed), lobbied hard AGAINST this proposal, and was so upset that it passed that they dropped out of the ELCA altogether. When my parents heard that, they decided they wouldn't be attending that church anymore.
My dad even has a friend who is a former Lutheran minister, and when he heard that news, he was outraged and said, "Whatever happened to 'love your neighbor as yourself'?" I told my parents I agreed and was proud that they took a stand. I also told them that this was exactly the kind of crap that soured me on religion way back when I first started to think for myself.
The funny thing is, when I first went away to college (when I really started to have an "awakening" and opened my mind and started thinking for myself), my parents were right-wing conservatives who listened to Rush Limbaugh and criticized pretty much everything I stood for. Now, as I get older, rather than me becoming more and more like my parents, my parents are becoming more and more like me. My dad has always been a Democrat (our family has a long history of being staunch Democrats--there was a time when you were not allowed to utter the name William Howard Taft at the dining table), but he was always a right-wing Democrat. He voted for Reagan twice and H.W. Bush twice. Since then, he's completely abandoned the right-wing, and I even know for a fact that he voted for Kerry and Obama. My mom, who was always a registered Republican, got so upset at the Republican Party during the Bush years that she changed her registration and is now a registered Democrat.
So, not only is it funny that as I get older, my parents become more like me, but it's also interesting because MY parents stand in stark contrast to my wife's parents, who are avid church-going, Faux News-viewing, Rush Limbaugh-listening, Bush-can-do-no-wrong-and-Obama-is-the-devil right-wingers. They probably would have applauded their church's decision to drop out after the governing body officially declared that gays might actually bear some slight resemblance to human beings. Another interesting contrast: my family can openly discuss politics without the debate turning ugly, whereas I am strictly forbidden (mostly by myself) to talk politics with my Bush-can-do-no-wrong father-in-law, because if you say one word that clashes with his ultra-right-wing worldview, he'll fly off the handle and start spewing obscenities at you. Why is it that the Republican Party is so attractive to people who anger easily and have no ability to conduct an intelligent conversation on a topic with which they disagree? Hmmmmmmm.
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