My aunt asked me how I feel about politics. here's a short answer.

It would probably take a week of non-stop talking with no pauses for breaths to explain my feelings on politics.

Here’s the Cliff notes version.

1.       I left the Republican party after my mom died. I used to think if we just “did what we were supposed to” everything would be o.k. and the problem (as I saw it) with the Democrats was they always wanted to mess things up and create more rules. My mom dying shook that belief to the core. I don’t know if you know this – I kind of hope you do as it’s probably a bad way to learn something new – but my mom killed herself. My earliest memory is one of her suicide attempts. I believed as long as I could and as hard as I could that if you just did what you were supposed to bad things wouldn’t happen. Didn’t work. My mom died anyway.

2.       At the same time, I began to see what I’ll call hypocrisy in the Republican party. Small government types who believed in state’s rights and individual responsibility but who – at the exact same time – wanted to deny folks like me rights. I could marry someone named “Bill” tomorrow and have more civil rights than Penni and I will probably have in our lifetimes. Everything from Social Security to inheritance rights and so on. I didn’t really get (and still don’t) how small government equals the oppression of a minority. If I paid a lower tax rate than heterosexuals I might understand lesser rights. But I don’t and I still have them. Individual liberty, fewer regulations and son on coupled with wanting to be in my bedroom (and assuming that’s the only thing gay people think about) bothered me a lot.

3.       For many years I voted third party.

4.       In the mid- to late 2000’s I began to feel like I was throwing my vote away as a protest.

5.       In addition, it seemed to me that the party of small government had become big and bloated and interested in power. Bush took a surplus created by Clinton (never voted for Clinton; don’t regret that decision) and created a deficit. Add that to a bad economy and wars and it just didn’t make sense to me.

6.       I watched as Republican congresses and presidents insisted on unfunded wars and holding power over a woman’s body and using fear of folks like me to get folks to the polls and I was very bothered. I didn’t like the idea that we had to pay and pay and pay to fight unwinnable wars, and control a woman’s body (I have real moral problems with the idea of abortion) but that the same folks screaming about woman carrying their babies to term were also screaming that we were spending too much on education and healthcare and so on. I don’t get how it’s o.k. to have a 10 year (and counting) war that isn’t paid for but that we can’t figure out how to take care of our citizens in what I think is the greatest country on earth.

 Then again, I’m absolutely convinced that the Democrats don’t have the answer either. I don’t think a third party is viable at a national level – though they’ve had some success at the state level. But I can’t vote for a Republican when they spend time talking about the “gay agenda.” My only agenda is getting up in the morning, going to work as long as I’m blessed to have a job, paying my bills, spending time with someone who cares about me, feeding the dogs, playing tennis. All the stuff that the folks screaming about my “agenda” do on a daily basis, too.