My mom and I are on the same, local group for a social media site. This means I get posting on whatever she posts there.
She can be a wonderful person, when she wants to be, but if you want to know why I'm going to have a fun time coming out while she's still in the same country, well...
It started out a couple weeks ago. I haven't talked to her about any of this, wanting to stay above/away from the situation as much as possible. She linked to an article that kind of overexaggerated the effects of the Oregon cake case, claiming that they gagged the bakers as well as sued them. I don't think the entire thing was cool or okay, either, but they didn't gag them, and at the same time, in the same post, she was talking about how no one should be forced to serve against their religion, that it's like forcing a Jewish man to eat pork or an Amish to go to war. That's the part I have a problem with.
See, for my mom, it's against her religion to have LGB relationships. That's cool, no one's forcing it on her, it's her life, you know?
But then she starts making the above points, basically reverse religious discrimination, or using your religion to discriminate against others.
People started calling her out on it, one of my favorites being that a Jewish man can still serve pork and not eat it and be okay, and she defended herself by comparing LGB to the No Shoes, No Shirts, No Service signs. If we can refuse service on the basis of the latter, then why can't we refuse LGB people as well?
Nevermind apples to oranges-- you can't help being gay, but you can help not wearing shoes! One's a protected class of people, the other not.
So this morning, I wake up, and she's linked to an article from a very conservative/spin-heavy news source listed on Snopes, talking about how Oregon will now let 15 year olds apply for gender reassignment surgery without their parental consent.
Which is part of a bigger law, just shuffling it under Medicare so it's affordable. Plus it's going to be real hard to get reassignment surgery unless you're visiting a quack doctor who will sign off on everything in a visit, because it usually requires years of therapy and an okay. Not any teen can walk in and go "Yo, me want to be other gender now kthx."
She then compares it to Turner Syndrome, which is a sexual condition, not a gender condition. It's a physical thing, not a mental thing, really.
So yeah, to those wondering why I won't be coming out until my mother's in a foreign country, preferably Australia or Russia, now you know.
Same mom who once found out I was pagan, at 17, and shamed me for it, claiming I was the one who brought all the ghosts to haunt our house (it'd been going on for much longer than that), and refused to believe me when I said it was peaceful (she turned it around and asked me if it was peaceful, then why are we fighting? ...Um, because you started it, I didn't? That's like hitting Ghandi and then blaming him for the nuke *Civilization joke...*)
She also tried using the pagan thing to shame me in front of my SO, who has Roman Catholic parents (that really don't give a rat's bahooka. So long as I'm not sacrificing innocent creatures to the devil or something.) Plus he's not a practicing Catholic himself.
The flipside? My dad's a much more understanding person, and probably where I got a lot of my whoo from. He was a practicing Shintoist before he met my mom, and accepts me being pagan just fine (we both know I am, we just don't bring it up infront of my mom.)
