We were in your back yard, eating a nice dinner at your picnic table. I think there was corn on the cob. It was sunny, because it’s California and the light was filtering down through leaves or a shade. You were all there, but Andrew is the one I’m addressing right now.
You tried to tell a joke about being on an airplane with Christy and being told that personal items could be held on your lap. It wasn’t a good joke. No one laughed. Actually, it was quite uncomfortable. Although, you grinned. The punchline was that Christy was your personal item.
I’ve thought about this joke off and on for years now. The way it captures your entire attitude, all the other little sexist remarks you’ve made that I’ve watched others allow to fly under the radar. And I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I learned about the new big phrase that grown men and even school-aged boys are telling to women and girls now that Trump has won re-election.
“Your body, my choice.”
I think it’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. It’s the antithesis of absolutely everything I’ve ever believed in. It is the most simple, straightforward, and complete perversion of any kind of equality or freedom.
And it’s exactly the same sentiment as your airline joke that I’ve never been able to get out of my head. No one called you on it. Well, I’m calling you on it now, and I’m calling all the rest of you on your silence. All of you have fundamentally failed as parents, because you have failed to instill the absolute most basic form of human decency — Ralph and Suzy failed to instill it in Andrew and seemingly continue to fail at calling him out on it; Christy tolerates it in a co-parent; and Andrew, you are despicable. This is why we don’t see you anymore. This is why we don’t talk to you. I will not submit my children to that kind of ugliness, and it pains me to know that it’s being inflicted on yours.
I hope you’ve improved. I hope that someday you’ll all apologize for the coldness you showed when I tried to explain to each of you after the 2016 election how deeply important it was to support women’s unfettered right to comprehensive healthcare. I hope you’ll realize that the words “pro-life” are used as a screen to cause death, to punish women for merely existing, and treat them as less than fully human. I don’t have a lot of hope, but I’m stubborn, so I do hope.
Also, I hope that your boys, against all odds, will be better than you. But failing that, I really hope that any women they hurt with the attitude you’re modeling manage to escape without coming to too much harm.
Jokes like yours, attitudes like yours, Andrew, that is exactly why my family stays entirely away from Christianity. You make the entire religion look bad. Perhaps the one positive from these attitudes is that they finally publicly demonstrate exactly what your religion is all about, so that anyone looking for kindness, compassion, or the attitudes embodied in Jesus Christ can avoid it like the plague it has become.
-Mary E. Lowd, with help from and co-signing by Daniel