Sorry We Missed Church

From the Austin Chronicle, Michael Ventura's Letters at 3 a.m. column:

Driving 19th Street in Lubbock alongside the sprawling edifices of Texas Tech, the little tin-can car in front of me sported quite a bumper sticker: SORRY WE MISSED CHURCH, WE WERE BUSY/LEARNING WITCHCRAFT AND BECOMING LESBIANS.

That bumper sticker won't cost you in Los Angeles or Austin, but it takes rare nerve to paste those words on your tail in the Bible Belt. (Lubbock has, I am told, more churches per capita than any city anywhere.) The tin can had Texas plates, and any Texan knows that sticker won't be taken lightly around here. I had to see who was driving that car. I pulled up alongside. The driver and her passenger were women of about 18, maybe 20. They wore tractor hats or maybe baseball caps, with brims pulled backwards, and they were laughing. They didn't notice me salute them, and they couldn't know that I was thinking, Next to these kids, I'm a wuss.

And

Your freedom may be backed by law, but your freedom can't be given you by law. You give it to yourself by how far you're willing to go. You give it to yourself by what stakes you're willing to play for. Do your loved ones – or your town, or your country – limit how free you are by what they can and cannot tolerate? How much of that are you willing to take? Is your freedom limited by your own fear? In this case, the freedom we're talking about is basic: the freedom to be oneself. That's what these women were putting to the test – testing themselves, testing their society. And risking all kinds of hell to do it. East and West Coast writers pontificating about "the red states" don't imagine that those very states are also places of the purest rebellions, where rebels walk their talk on tightropes.

And

Those brave lesbian/witchcraft gals in their cheap tin-can car sporting their bravado bumper sticker – if they can drive unmolested for even a block down Lubbock's 19th Street, their very existence (regardless of what price they may pay) testifies to a tectonic shift in the solidity of what Americans can assume is real or normal. The more you must enforce a dictum of normality, the less that normality actually exists. Those gals are saying to Lubbock, "Your idea of normal is over. Now it's normal for you to have to deal with us. However threatening we are to you – that's the measure of how little you really believe in your own reality, and that's the gauge of your desperate clinging to notions that no longer work. If you were sure of your beliefs, you wouldn't be threatened."

Click here for the rest.

After Katrina destroyed New Orleans, a group of evangelists I used to see on Bourbon Street seems to have moved their agit-ministry to Baton Rouge. Now, instead of screaming at drunken revelers in the French Quarter, they scream at college students at "Free Speech Alley" in front of the student union here at LSU on Tuesdays. Typically, when I pass by, I watch from the back for a bit, checking out the dynamic between the fire-and-brimstone folk and disdainful undergrad pseudo-intellectuals. Far more entertaining than most reality shows on television. Sometimes the debate is interesting, like when a bearded, scraggly young student tried to trip up a preacher on some of the ambiguities in Genesis. Other times it's simply absurd, like the time another student stood right next to a pontificating preacher with a big sign that said "NEVER BEEN LAID" complete with an arrow pointing at the holy man.

A couple of weeks ago, my cool detachment was blown when the preacher man looked me right in the eye and called me a God-hating pervert. Before even making a decision to speak, I heard myself butting in and saying this:

"Everything you're telling us assumes that we agree with you that the Bible is the word of the Lord. Well, I don't think the Bible is the word of God, so, as far as I'm concerned, you have absolutely no authority to tell me how to live my life."

The preacher paused and thought for a moment, then said, "So you think this book is just a fairy tale?"

"Yeah, parts of it."

"Well I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to them. Why don't you just move along? Move on. I've nothing to say to you."

"Wait. What?"

"Just ignore me. I'm not talking to you."

"But I can't ignore you guys. You fundamentalists are wired into the Republican Party and they run the whole country. Ignoring you is insane."

The preacher practiced what he was preaching and simply ignored me. After a moment, I did move on, but one of their group followed me. He tried to engage me in a conversation about faith. I was straight up with him, telling him about my Southern Baptist background, how I was saved when I was twelve, and quit when I was twenty five. He asked why I quit and I told him that, ultimately, large parts of the Bible struck me as plainly immoral, and therefore could not be the word of God, who I consider to be the source of all true morality. Suddenly, we were having a convoluted exchange about evolution, and I realized that this guy was unwilling or unable to actually respond to what I was saying. Like his fellow preacher, he was ignoring me--he simply chose to keep talking while he was ignoring.

I told him I had to go and moved on.

Later, I told my mom about the whole event. She was worried about my safety; she told me not to do anything that might get me killed. I responded that "Free Speech Alley" isn't quite the same thing as a parking lot outside of a bar, but her point was well taken. Free speech is a dangerous thing. Because speech alters reality. Obviously, I don't mean that reality is literally altered by speech: what I mean is that speech, when persuasive, alters how people perceive reality, and people then behave as though what they perceive is actually real--probably the best example of this I can describe is American opinion during the run up to the invasion of Iraq; people believed Saddam had WMD which he would give to Bin Laden, so they supported the war.

Coming out of the Iraq example is this corollary: beliefs are ultimately far more important to people than facts. Indeed, for most people beliefs are facts, and, usually, there is a strong emotional attachment to these "facts." Consequently, challenging the "facts" can piss people off, which is another reason free speech is so dangerous.

Anyway, to cut this ramble short, what I'm trying to get at is that when we argue about politics or art or culture or religion, we're actually defining reality in a not insignificant way. Currently, the psychos have a leg up in this realm, and have successfully defined reality such that American existence is far more harsh for far too many people than it has to be. It is morally imperative, then, for enlightened Americans to vigorously redefine American reality in a more positive direction through the use of dangerous free speech. It is not an acceptable excuse to fear hostile reprisal. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying to argue with drunks or bikers or gun nuts or anything like that. But too many people shy away from debating, in casual conversation, or publicly, the most important issues of our time for fear of offending. But that's not very American. Our country was founded on the principle that the best solutions to public problems can be found through intense debate. Without the "Marketplace of Ideas," we're not really a democracy, not really free.

But so many people keep their damned mouths shut.

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