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I have very strong beliefs about politics. I am a feminist, progressive, for homosexual rights, and for minority rights. I try to live up to these beliefs as much as I can (though I’m not perfect at it).

Part of having these beliefs, I think, is standing up to people when they are degenerating people based on characteristics like race, sex, gender orientation or when they are misrepresenting people’s beliefs. Unfortunately, this means a good deal of the time my interpersonal relationships can be strained, or have many tense moments. This is also compounded by my not great ability to “pick my battles”.

I know that calling people on stuff is effective. My friends may make fun of me all the time for being a “liberal hippie” and occasionally say things only to get a rise out of me…but, they don’t use the word “gay” as a serious insult. And I once heard one of them tell someone else off for using it as an insult. And now they’re starting to see all the things that I keep babbling about women’s rights: how women get looked at and called at in public, how it’s expected that women do the clean-up and set-up at mixed gender events, how very few women there are in movies, and how they have even fewer “roles” to play in.

My father and I have a tense relationship; and this is never more so than when politics come up. Every once in a while though, he does concede I have a few points. He realizes now the value of Title IX when he sees his daughters playing sports. And there was even one time when a situation that I thought was sure a mistake to bring up politics actually later was shown to be effective*

But most of the time, I’m not sure if I’m helping anything. Sometimes I think I’m actually making things worse. There are many classic examples: asking my (now) father-in-law how he reconciled his desire to do violence with Christ’s call to pacifism, telling my Marine friend that I couldn’t go into the military because I “didn’t do blind obedience” and telling my friend that the only reason he opposed abortion was because he wasn’t planned and he doesn’t like having an existential crisis. In hindsight, these were INCREDIBLY rude things to say; and quite frankly, when I said them, it might have been less of a desire to meet progressive ideals and more of a desire to “win” an argument. But then there are times when I’m not meaning to be rude, I’m not meaning to “win” an argument, but that there just seems like no polite way to say to someone that what they are doing seems wrong.

My dad was here this week, and I had to play the game of “what don’t I say”. This is a game that I go and decide what things are worth calling him on, what things are him trying to get a reaction out of me, and what things are just a waste of breathe. If I decide that things are worth calling him on, then there’s the “how do I put it to get him to listen” and “at what point do I cut my loses?” I think I did okay:

Things to not waste my breathe on:
Calling illegal aliens “wets” or “wetbacks”
Saying that things were safer/better/greater when he was younger
How much I paid attention to him as a child (his opinnion? Too much)

Things he is simply trying to get a rise out of me (and is fairly successful at):
My driving ability, and the driving ability of women as a whole
Threatening to ogle women at the Wellness center
Hubby washing the dishes

Things that I waste my breathe on:
Saying “those people” (meaning, “black people”) aren’t smart enough to use birth control.
This one I countered by showing his examples were worthless. His big one that he was pining this on was my half-black cousin who has had 3 children out-of-wedlock. My counter was that her 100% white mother (my father’s sister) had HER out of wed-lock, as did another one of my aunts, so it seems failure to use birth control isn’t really race-oriented, and that abstience-only education might have something to do with it. His response: “You can’t tell me that kids don’t tell each other things about sex”. My cut off point: when he felt the legitimacy of such gems as “you can’t get pregnant with a swimmer” counted equally as birth control discussion.

Domestic violence jokes are funny.
My dad has hit my mom on more than one occasion. This is particularly not-funny in this context. I didn’t even talk to him on this one, just said “not cool” and left. I was still willing to make this one a tense situation.

Gay people are dangerous.
This requires a little bit of background. My dad likes to hunt. Frequently, he hunts with other men. When he hunts with other men, generally they end up having to share space and water for bathing. My dad finds it the height of humor to make sexual innuendos to the (completely straight) hunting partners, like saying that another guy has a “cute ass” when they share a pup-tent.
During this last visit, he announced that he should take PE to go hunting to “man him up”. But he made sure to point out that he wasn’t going to make those kinds of jokes because “he didn’t know about that one- he might like it”.
My response: 1) PE is not gay 2)if he was gay, what makes you think he would be attracted to your middle-aged, married self and 3) gay people are not dangerous. His response, of course, was that he was “just kidding” and I “need to lighten up”.
I honestly wish there was some sort of mental flow chart I could just come up with that had a list of factors determining who’s worth the effort, who isn’t, and when. But, I can’t think of anything, so imperfect battle choosing it is.

*My dad has property up in the middle of nowhere Bottineau, ND, where he stored some ammunition. We went out there to pull it out, and we found it missing, with a bunch of beer bottles around. He said “Damn Indians must of got it”. I gave him a dirty look, which he replied, defensively, “What?”. I told him “You have no way of knowing who did this. It could have been the kids from the local college. It could have been our neighbors, who we’ve already caught here. You just don’t know”. He responded, angrily that “I do too know: it’s little smart mouths like you that don’t. I’ve lived up here, and I know what those people are like. You just don’t have any experience in the world”. I didn’t say anything (because, as old as I get, I’m still terrified of my dad) but, I still had an incredulous (and I suppose, a little ashamed) expression on my face. Later, my dad did come up to me and apologized, and said I was right: he really didn’t know who stole the ammo, and he shouldn’t have said that. My dad is still pretty racist, but teaspoons.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Punkass!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.