The Party of God

I love how some conservative Christian groups think they're the only real party of God. One of their prime missions seems to be to undercut civil and human rights, particularly for gay citizens. Why these organizations are so obsessed with people's sexual orientation makes no sense to me, but to them, I suppose it has to do with reproduction. I don't really care, because gay, lesbian, and trans-gendered people must have the same legal and cultural rights and protection as heterosexuals. End of story. Abortion rights must also be protected. As a friend of mine recently put it, if a woman's right to her own body is taken away, we might as well be living under the Taliban. Yeah, the Christian Taliban.

Lately, the American Family Association based in Tupelo, Mississippi, launched a national boycott of Detroit's Ford Motor Company because it co-sponsored a "gay-friendly" event in Ferndale called Motor City Pride. The boycott is so stupid that I'm reminded of the immortal words of Clint Eastwood as Blondie in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly : God hates idiots, also. I've been to Tupelo, the site of a Civil War battle and birthplace of Elvis. Apparently, there's not much to do these days except worry about sexual orientation and similar issues. Fine, but Ford is having enough trouble: why not boycott the Iraq War? Isn't that a family issue, too?

An interesting and depressing take on modern family issues is HBO's Hysterical Blindness (2002). In it, Debby, the Uma Thurman character, lives with her mother Virginia (Gena Rowlands) in late 1980s Bayonne, New Jersey. Virginia's husband abandoned the family when Debby was thirteen, and now pushing thirty, Debby desperately tries to find a stable man to settle down with. Nearly every night, she and her best friend Beth (Juliette Lewis) go to a local bar to troll for men, with sad results. While out, Beth leaves her young daughter at home, usually without anyone to watch her. Hysterical Blindness provides good insight into the sad state of society and the hardships of single women in particular, where nearly everyone must fend for themselves and there are few reliable social nets. The one bit of uplift in this story is Ben Gazzara's character. He woos Virginia, who works as a waitress, and for a short time, they find happiness. The cast is excellent, and Uma Thurman does a brilliant job as a working class woman lost in the modern world. A work like this is far more interesting than some misguided boycott, and the issues it raises are far more complex than politics or panaceas.

Ciao!