Getting the Story Straight

My partner and I ran into a neighbor today, and stopped to chat.

"I was just talking to my friends about you," she said. My perenially-inflated ego puffed audibly. We don't talk with this neighbor often; what could she possibly be telling her friends about us? How hot we are? What amazing children we have? About my writing? Particularly that essay I got published in—

"I told them how the Catholic school across the street wouldn't let your daughter attend because of your two-mom family," she said with a glance toward the villainous edifice.

I looked over at my ten-year-old daughter, who showed no reaction to this news. She had indeed attended pre-school there, came home one night, and dreamt she was being nailed to a cross.

Visions of the Catholic school's principal swam in front of me: her cerulean eyeshadow, her thick hose, the Pomeranian she carries to work, her vanity plates, the night she helped us carry our groceries into our house.

"The Catholic school was lovely," my partner said. "The principal is lovely. The teachers are lovely. There was never an issue about two moms."

We'd pulled our daughter out because of the vitriolic effluvium belching from the Vatican, which declared gay marriage "deviant and immoral," and said that allowing gays to adopt was a form of "violence". 

Around the same time, the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a warning that yoga could "degenerate into a cult of the body.''

Do not fuck with yoga. Or with my family.

"How will I be able to look my daughter in the eye," I'd told the principal, "and explain why I educated her in a religious institution that preaches hatred toward her own family?" (hatred: noun: intense dislike or extreme aversion or hostility)

"We don't," the principal said. "My teachers don't, my staff don't. I wouldn't allow it."

I'm very fond of the principal. I wonder if our neighbor's friends were outraged to hear about this horrible school. How many things have I been outraged over that never happened? But some things do happen. Like our own Cardinal's statement that the "gay liberation movement" could “morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan.” That happened. Which is why my kids aren't attending the lovely school across the street.