No Bull Mom

What Must a Girl Do To Show Her Liberal Stripes?

Hold on to your hat: I'm going to praise the Sixties era (for an interesting take on this subject, click here) -- and possibly even modern feminists. I know, I know, it goes against human nature; but I believe in giving credit where credit is due.

One positive is that I believe feminism is partly responsible for fathers' involvement at home -- which has been nothing but a boon for kids, in my opinion. (It can sometime pose problems for husbands and wives, though, since reversing gender roles isn't exactly natural.) Though I'm not convinced America wouldn't have naturally moved in this direction with or without a movement, helping it along certainly wasn't a bad thing.

But without a doubt, the main positive that came out of the 60s was great music. Hands down, the greatest music of all time. I was thinking about this this morning as I was listening to Janis Joplin, which immediately catapulted me to another time and place. It's amazing how music can do that: put you back in another time in your life when you were surrounded by completely different people. For me, 1960s music sends me back to my college days. I thought about my experiences back then, how political seeds were being planted even then.

I was the girl who hailed from the Midwest. I went to Boston University, and everyone I knew had been raised on the East Coast: Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. This served as quite an education for me.

To begin with, my closest friends were Jewish. This may not seem like a big deal, but I went to a Catholic high school and had known only one Jewish person in my entire life. (That's one way St. Louis lags behind: integration.) I didn't think anything about this one way or the other until I was in college and coincidentally found a comraderie with Jewish women, which I'm convinced is because we share a similar constitution. Yes, I know: I'm stereotyping. But some stereotyping in life is necessary. Jewish women are, generally speaking, a confident bunch -- which I like. Of course they tend to be a liberal lot, but hey -- no one's perfect.

Of course the college experience itself is very liberal -- at least up East it is. Indeed, I quickly became known as the "conservative" among the group, but here's what's interesting: I was labeled as such for three main reasons: I didn't use hard drugs; I didn't sleep around; and I didn't go to Washington D.C. to march in pro-choice demonstrations. Funny thing is, at the time I considered myself quite liberal. I didn't eschew recreational marijuana use; I didn't (and don't) have a problem with mature, responsible, premarital sex (though I did -- and do -- have a problem with casual sex, or "hooking up"); and I wasn't (and am still not) what you would call a "lifer." I part ways with my solidly conservative friends when it comes to abortion and voluntary euthanasia. While I'm not pro-choice, I'm also not looking to overturn any laws. Nevertheless, I was still dubbed the conservative girl from the Midwest during college.

As an adult things haven't been much different. I've been labeled conservative for my position on stay-at-home motherhood -- which merely translates to believing a parent should be home when the kids are home. (That this has even become debatable still shocks me.)

My point is that what it means to be liberal or conservative has become entirely skewed; hence the reason for this blog. My next post will be about The Rise of the Moderate. I think this America is already here. The most recent Gallup numbers show the following in terms of how Americans describe themselves:

40% conservative
21% liberal
35% moderate

Any way you look at it, being "liberal" today is not popular -- though it would appear otherwise. With a far-left president and his cronies in the media, it can be hard to keep the above statistics in the forefront of our collective mind.