Life As Performance Art 150

I attend a church that is part of a denomination that is overrun by the strident overkill of political correctness. I used to consider myself politically correct, sort of, and I would tar with the same brush of socio-political outrage as being far right fascists in the league of Adolph Hitler or Generalissimo Francisco Franco anyone who would question or call me out on it. They say that we tend to get more conservative as we age. Or maybe we just get a little more common sense. First of all, I am not a feminist. I do believe strongly in women's equality in the workplace. I am not so sure about abortion. I refuse to take a decided stand on pro-choice or pro-life issues because I really think that each woman carrying a fetus, or a child, in her womb, has to be treated and respected as an individual, and I just don't know all the facts, ethics and science around this matter in order to take a decided stand. I will never stand in the way of someone getting an abortion. Neither will I try to make up her mind for her, even if I still instinctively view abortion as a tragic choice or consequence of the deplorable lack of options that women and other people are so often faced with. In the meantime, if a woman friend of mine chooses to abort, I will respect the choice that she has made. Likewise if she chooses to give birth, if she puts the baby up for adoption or opts to raise the child. My tendency is to stand with others, to support others, regardless of the choices they make in life, and regardless of my personal opinions, as long as my own safety is not being compromised. This is not the same thing as actually agreeing with them or of taking on their positions as my own, and that is an important distinction that Anglicans tend to be very poor at making. A lot of us seem to think, (or rather not to think at all), in terms of so identifying with any cause de jour of social justice as to completely abandon our identity as Christians in our zeal to stand with perceived victims of perceived and real injustice. This makes us a bit of a laughingstock, I'm afraid. I am not an LGBTetc. crusader. I do support gay marriage and the complete inclusion of queer people in life and in society and in our communities, being myself a queer man. I will not march in the Pride Parade, much as I endorse it otherwise. Why? For one thing, I find them woefully tunnel-visioned and intolerant, for example when they banned the Vancouver Public Library from participating because they had rented out one of their meeting facilities to Meghan Murphy, a feminist writer who does not agree that transwomen are real women (and I happen to agree with her!) I will not challenge (though I do question)the judgement of Anglicans who choose to march in the parade, for the simple reason that walking with Jesus does not mean walking with social causes that we support because here we risk idolatry and losing our focus on Christ. Our love and support must go everywhere and follow our hearts, but we identify with God, incarnated, crucified and resurrected for us and with us, and that has to take priority in our witness as Christians (and too often, it doesn't). I do not lie awake till the wee hours worrying about gender pronouns, and I really think it's highly impertinent of some individuals to demand that we refer to them as they and their, especially given my belief that for any person to function healthily, they also are going to need to accept and integrate their biological gender with the rest of their identity, no matter how much paradox they have to sort through. As an androgynous man, that is exactly what I have had to do, and working through paradox has done much to help me grow as a person. I accept transpeople, but I do not agree that they are real women or men. Their DNA is always going to read as their assigned gender at birth. I am also concerned that transpeople tend to be themselves victims and dupes of the gender binary. Instead of accepting that men and women are equally capable of being feminine or masculine, they have simply swallowed the nonsense that because they feel and identify as being really feminine or really masculine, that they are living in the wrong body, but no amount of surgical mutilation is going to make a man into a woman or vice-versa. Where the church really defaults on its pastoral responsibilities towards transpeople is in blindly swallowing this nonsense, rather than challenging our own definitions of gender, so that no one should have to go such an extreme route of mutilating their bodies to conform to the gender of their choosing. By the same token, I identify naturally and intrinsically as Latino, rather than Canadian. But I was born and raised in Canada by Scots-German-Canadian parents, and only became fluent in Spanish in advanced middle age, and even if I feel Latino, there is nothing that I can do to alter the essential fact that I am really Canadian, and had might as well accept it. I am not an environmental activist, even if I am convinced that we need to stop using fossil fuels immediately if we want to see much of an earth and ourselves on it in another ten years. I do what I can. I don't drive a car, but I do fly, and I buy very little while reducing and reusing and recycling without turning into a self-righteous idiot. And even if I am a vegetarian, thank God I am not a vegan! Have I deeply offended anyone? Good! Now kindly get off my page and go read your Twitter feed instead. Last Sunday I attended a workshop at church about making church a safe place for everyone. Now, unfortunately, the focus was mainly and almost exclusively on sex. But Anglicans do tend to have rather dirty minds, so I will cut us a little slack here, Gentle Reader! Two proudly progressive women in our midst expressed how deeply offended they were at one segment, because the abuser, a priest, was a male, and the abused was probably a female, or something like that. You could almost hear everyone else's eyes rolling in their sockets, but the priest, showing admirable restraint and kindness, tactfully tried to explain to the little snowflakes that that is simply the usual gender equation in those situations of abuse, and the two delicate little darlings did kind of shut up after that. If it takes something so unimportant to deeply offend someone then I really am starting to worry about my church. Happy Sunday, Gentle Reader!