Generations are conveniently split - chopped - into sections...Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y...and generalizations made about them. As for me, I'm too young to be a Boomer and on the fringe of being too old to be an "X-er." Why is this relevant, and what in the name of Corn Flakes does it have to do with the title? Well...everything and nothing.
I was born and grew up in a very secular household - everything abhorrent to the Right Wing - liberal, secular-humanist, the rest. I watched PBS as a child, never went to any Church except to take pictures of Cathedrals, was brought up with a belief in rationality, science, evolution - all of that. My personal morality is based on the common good, the English Enlightenment theorists such as Locke and Adam Smith, a faith based on "enlightened self-interest" and the ultimate value of common sense.
I'll admit in my teenage years - the epoch of Reagan - I was a Republican. Odd, that, considering I attended Berkeley and then UW-Madison...both bastions of, shall we say, non-Conservative thinking. But...I was, if you will, a liberalist Republican even then. I supported (and still do) a strong national defense, the free market, the non-interference of Government in the lives of its citizens. But what happened? The Republican Party became the party of social as well as fiscal conservatism, and veered into territory which boggled me. Where in the Party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt is there a necessity to house those who wish to peek into bedrooms and regulate the use of sex toys, to probe library records with the mentality of a gossipy tsk-tsking auntie? Why is abortion not a Party Plank but a Party Beam?
Thus began my sojourn in the wilderness. I am of a Libertarian bent, but not of the hands-off-everything category. My basic values - faith that there is no difference between men and women that deserves inequality, there is no difference between races which merits any discrimination, that private lives should remain private as long as no-one is harmed, that intrusions of the arms of Government into one's lives should be viewed with suspicion - remain unchanged. My hobbies - comics, RPGs, MMORPGs, computer games - are pleasures, not seething pits of depravity, and those who don't understand them can just back the hell off and return to good old-fashioned Football violence.
So...I'm a Heathen. Not a Liberal, whatever that is...a Secular Humanist, perhaps, in some definition of the term. I am possessed of the unfashionable conviction that my wife's rights have just as much validity as my own, and that my daughter's life choices should be as open as my white-hetero-male's were and are. I am a patriot, but one informed of the notion that the United States is imperfect but is, perhaps, still the best country in which to be born or live, that it is not the new Jerusalem but a construct of compromises and decisions made by flawed mortals, and it is not its current state but its potential for change, for equality and justice, which is the most important feature. I believe in a strong military, one sufficient to protect justifiable American interests at home and abroad, to support allies and commitments, but it is not a mindless support of any usage of that military machine; Afghanistan? Yes! Iraq? Why the hell?
Thus I am, indeed, a Heathen. I worship the pagan idols of humanity, rationality, science, and common sense. For that I am barred from membership among the Elect...but I have a feeling I'm not alone in my damnation.
