Friends, Family, and Freedom

There's an old saying: never discuss religion or politics. This advice is routinely given to children, but sometimes forgotten by adults.

I have an uncle, my favorite uncle in fact, who's politics I agree with about 50%. This uncle, a former judge and big-shot in his religious organization of choice, is a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society. (Yes Virginia, there really is a JBS.) Then there's my mother; in 1972 she campaigned door-to-door for George McGovern (sometimes taking me and my sister with her). I learned a lot about commitment and activism that summer. But I agree with my mother only about 50% of the time.

My uncle and my mother are able to sit at a table and share a meal and love each other and have mutual respect - and keep politics off the menu. Religion (broadly speaking), is fair game as a topic, however. But not politics.

My in-laws are Roman Catholic, very Catholic. I am... not. My husband was an altar boy. He went to just about the most Catholic university in the country - twice. With my in-laws, we don't discuss religion, ever. Politics, broadly speaking, is a hot topic (it is California, after all).

Think you know what political party I belong to? Ten will get me $20, you're wrong.

It's a choice, getting along or not. To respect ourselves, each other, and the First Amendment, or not. Sadly, most of the time, the loudest people seem to be choosing not. We can't hear each other over the shouting, the raised angry voices screaming We're right and they're wrong and there is no middle ground. How on earth could healthy or constructive dialogue ever take place with that vitriol in the air?

I think the truth is: we all just need to STFU. By which I mean, we all need to stop becoming hysterical when somebody says something with which we don't agree. On the big issues - especially on the biggest issues, the third rail stuff - nobody is changing anybody else's mind. And hasn't in a very very long time, and any semblance of movement toward agreement is closer to impossible than difficult.

My uncle, who's smart and thoughtful and considerate and sometimes infuriatingly articulate, once told me (as we prepared Christmas dinner together, sharing a kitchen full of knives and boiling pots and glassware) that abortion is like slavery: the issue is that divisive. I didn't agree with him, at the time, but have come around to the opinion that he's probably right. Nobody is changing anybody's mind about anything, and sometimes it does look like a Civil War on the front lines of the issue.

As for me, I'm a big fan of Milton Friedman. A brilliant thinker and writer, proponent of personal freedoms and free markets. And responsibility in both. His death was a terrible loss for the world.

So think, believe, say what you want. I will, too. And I'll defend to the end your right to think, believe, and say what you want, even if I don't agree with you. And I expect you to do the same for me.

Because that's what freedom really means, and that's what friends (and family) do.

Even when there are certain things we don't talk about.