Some of you may remember the great post last November by “Cop’s Wife,” the mom who blogs at Nerdy Apple Bottom. She wrote about her five-year-old son, who wanted to be Daphne from Scooby Doo for Halloween, and the intolerant comments from other moms at the son’s preschool.
The son’s church preschool. Now, it turns out the church is upset. In a follow-up post, Cop’s Wife writes, “I was told that some members were worried that I was ‘promoting gayness.’ I don’t even know what that means. The words I had written were not promoting anything other than unconditional love and tolerance.”
She was also told she had broken the 8th Commandment for bearing false witness, and needed to do penance or would be forbidden from taking Communion. At no point was she asked about her son’s well being. “My blog post was calling out the actions of a few people that said some unkind things in front of my son,” she explained. “I asked for love and tolerance. Was I angry? Yes. I feel I had a right to be. Did I bear false witness? No. I spoke out against bullying. Now I am getting bullied from church.”
As she wrote, though, her experience is not meant to be an indictment of religion in general or Christianity in particular. What it does show, however, is that bullies may hide behind religion (among other things) to try and justify their actions. As one commenter on her latest post said, though, they’ve messed with the wrong mom this time. Please read her story and share.
Thank you for keeping us updated on this. I passed the news on on Twitter, with a h/t to you, and I think when it got forwarded some omitted the h/t. For that I apologize.
One of the things that struck me about the power of “Cop’s Wife’s” post was the moral authority it held within the communities I feel could use her perspective the most. We LGBT parents of gender-nonconforming kids are presumed either to have caused the aberration, and are therefore in no position to defend our kids (we did it to ‘em in the first place!), or to be so overly sympathetic to gender nonconformity as to be unconvincing champions of it in our kids. If any of that makes sense.
A shorter way to put it is that right or wrong, it’s always so much more socially powerful for a member of an in-group to defend a member of an out-group than it is for members from within that out-group to defend themselves. Least that’s always what I’ve thought, as I’ve criss-crossed the lines of self-defense and defense of others.
She is so clear-eyed, too, and so unremitting, so basically emotionally generous, all that. We get to see what’s right and wrong in that situation so well because she does.
I hope her faith community finds a way to grow with her. There are many open and affirming Christian denominations and congregations that would applaud her moral courage. But for everyone’s sake my hope is that the growth happens in her immediate community.
Anyway, thanks again, Dana, for being our eyes and ears and wide-awake conscience.
Thanks for helping to spread the word, Polly. You say, “it’s always so much more socially powerful for a member of an in-group to defend a member of an out-group than it is for members from within that out-group to defend themselves.” I think that sentiment plays into Ted Olson’s defense of marriage equality in the Prop 8 trial, too.