Posts Tagged ‘respect’

I had a conversation with someone today. It’s my usual holiday conversation about the existence of Christ. As a gratefully recovering Catholic and now proud atheist, I did my usual dance of trying to be considerate and polite and changing the subject. As is often the case, my friend continued on undeterred with great curiosity about how I cannot believe in any god and what that might mean. I obliged by quickly employing the word delusional and said that I see no difference between one fairy tale and another. Predictably, we finished up pretty quickly after that.

I took my 8 y/o daughter recently to visit the grave of my grandmother and grandfather. They’re buried in a little cemetery in Batavia, IL called Resurrection. My daughter said it was too bad that we didn’t bring flowers and I agreed. I’m not much of a cemetery visitor myself, but there is something about flowers.

We agreed to bring flowers next time.

This post is not about Sexism or Feminism, it is about my experience in talking about them.

I have had several conversations lately about how people engage in debate over sex / gender / body (SGB) identity issues. I am launching a blog that supports dialogue on those issues and in the communities that they create. As I frame the terms of the conversations and the goals of the site, I have begun to articulate my view on the structure of dialogue itself.

Simply put, I have been thinking about how we treat each other inside a conversation about SGB issues and identity. I noticed some patterns of how we seem argue with each other inside these conversations. This post is not about something specific to SGB issues, advocates themselves or the conversations. This is about how we speak to each other about those issues. SGB issue conversations are not somehow different from other conversations. I simply care about them more. This applies to Racism, Classism, TG discrimination or any other conversation regarding society and individuals.