Conceal, Don't Feel

Like all things that get super popular super fast, the Disney movie Frozen has started to receive its inevitable backlash. People are finding all the plot holes, like the dodgy parenting and crazy acts of a crazy sister. And of course, people are sick of the songs, like "Let It Go" in particular.

But you know what? I loved the movie. And I love "Let It Go". And here's why.

First, let me state that I think it's just an adorable movie. It's entertaining, the characters are charming, Idina Menzel rocks my world and has done since playing Maureen in RENT. It's a kids' movie, so I don't worry much about why on earth a couple of parents would think it was wise to lock a kid up rather than teaching her how to control her powers. I love the message at the end that a) you don't need a man to save you and b) the act of true love that saved her was committed by her own love for her sister. Come on, it's a great message.

I just love it.

"Let It Go" is a great song. It's got all the Disney/Broadway key elements to it - passion, emotion, a a riveting crescendo, Idina Menzel. It's not about lesbianism (though even if it was, I'm cool with that) but about freeing oneself from the conformity forced upon them. In Elsa's case, it was the freedom to freeze a bunch of stuff without (she thinks) any retribution. And I suppose for a girl who realizes she's a lesbian, it's a song about the freedom to come out. (Though Elsa was not a lesbian. This just isn't in the movie. For me though, it's a song about letting go of religion.

I know I'm not alone in this. I know there are lots of other people who have been reduced to tears by the power of Elsa's words in this song in the context of "letting go" of the religious beliefs that they have been conforming to for years. I'm just going to go through this song, emboldening the lyrics that really touch me, and if necessary (though I'm sure you're smart enough to get the connections) adding some commentary on how it makes me feel in that context. Keeping in mind the song IS about freezing stuff, so you know, the "snow" would have to become metaphorical, which is actually still a pretty good metaphor for someone feeling stuck in a belief system and culture they can no longer accept for themselves. It's a pretty frozen place to be.

The snow glows white on the mountain tonight
Not a footprint to be seen.
A kingdom of isolation,
And it looks like I’m the queen.

The wind is howling like this swirling storm inside,
Couldn’t keep it in, heaven knows I tried

[Heaven KNOWS I tried. I tried for YEARS to contain the storm that was swirling inside me. Knowing I didn't really believe any of this anymore but refusing to accept it. I tried so hard, but eventually, I just couldn't bear the storm inside me any longer.]

Don’t let them in, don’t let them see,
Be the good girl you always have to be.
Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know,

[I wanted to be that good girl I'd always been - the girl who lead worship at church, who knew the Bible intimately, who spoke up at Bible studies and prayed out loud, who loved people and reached out to them. I didn't want anyone to know I wasn't that girl anymore.]

Well, now they know!

[Actually not too many know yet. Word is getting around though.]

Let it go, let it go
Can’t hold it back anymore,
Let it go, let it go
Turn away and slam the door!

I don’t care
What they’re going to say
Let the storm rage on,
The cold never bothered me anyway.

[I'd like it not to bother me, that is. It actually does.]

It’s funny how some distance
Makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me
Can’t get to me at all.

[It's true. The further I get from it, the less I worry about it. The less I'm afraid of "hell", the less I'm worried about how people will treat me, the more I realize just how ludicrous Christianity, and all religion, is. Particularly poignant is how the "fears that once controlled me can't get to me at all" is - the threat of hell is horrifying and paralyzing, but the further away I get from it, the more I see it for what it is: manipulation.]

It’s time to see what I can do,
To test the limits and break through.
No right, no wrong, no rules for me,
I’m free!

[Without religion telling me what's right and wrong, I can finally accept what my heart has been telling me for years about right and wrong. Technically, without religion there is no actual "right and wrong"; that doesn't mean however that non-religious people have no morals. We are just willing to use critical thinking and humanitarian principles to inform what is ethical and fair. Like letting gay people get married.]

Let it go, let it go,
I am one with the wind and sky

[Sounds silly, but now that I see myself as a evolutionary development, I do feel more connected to the earth. We sprang from the earth, and we will return to the earth. It's kind of an amazing thing.]

Let it go, let it go,
You’ll never see me cry.

[Not true. But wouldn't it be nice if it were?]

Here I stand
And here I'll stay.
Let the storm rage on...

My power flurries through the air into the ground,
My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around,
And one thought crystallizes like an icy blast
I’m never going back,
The past is in the past!

[Can I get a non-religious AMEN to that?! It's the most freeing thought that I'm NEVER going back - the past is in the past!! Here's hoping I have at least another thirty years on earth to make up for the thirty years I lived in ignorance!]

Let it go, let it go,
And I'll rise like the break of dawn.
Let it go, let it go,
That perfect girl is gone.


[I don't have to be perfect! I can make mistakes! I will do my best as always to keep being the best me I can be, but now, I don't have a cosmic finger wagging at me every time I screw up or a book of rules to point out how supposedly broken I am inside. That perfect girl is gone; she left nothing but normal old me behind. Yes!]

Here I stand
In the light of day.
Let the storm rage on!
The cold never bothered me anyway.

[One day, one day soon, I'll stand in the light of day as an agnostic atheist. I'm still working on finding that courage within me.]


For so many years, I had the same Elsian (new word?) philosophy: Conceal, Don't Feel. "Put on a show; make one wrong move and everyone will know."  I concealed, not so much to myself or even to "God", but to everyone else, my doubts. I refused to feel how my doubts made me feel. Any time I allowed my feelings to spill over, I was drowned in my own tears, and drained afterwards from the emotional and mental distress. Losing my faith was utterly the most painful experience of my life. Having to conceal it so no one would know was exhausting. Keeping it to myself, refusing to feel it, refusing to "let it go" was isolating, like being locked in a dungeon all alone. The fear of what would happen if I "let it go" (aka hell) was more than I could bear.

Like Elsa, once I let go, everything changed. Even though she went through a rocky period before knowing how to "let it go" under control, she experienced freedom for the first time when she just let all that power explode around her. I know how Elsa felt, letting the storm rage on. It felt glorious.

Morally Opposed, Legislatively In Favor?

I have to say, I'm really appreciating this new blog I've started. I've been writing on my personal blog for over ten years now, but somehow, the things I have to say these days are easier to say in a separate place, away from the "me" people have come to know. Scott thinks I should just amalgamate the two and say what I want to say all in one place. But there's freedom here, and a little anonymity, and if it takes stepping out in tiny baby steps like this before I can really be open about my feelings and thoughts, then it's what I have to do.

I have always steered clear from political issues on my personal blog. Partly because up until lately, I've never cared too much about politics and wasn't very informed on issues. Since moving back to the US, both me and my husband have taken a renewed interest in politics. A lot of it has to do with the novelty of it; the United Kingdom has an interesting political system with multiple parties, but in Scotland, politics were boring to discuss - everyone votes Labour. Well, until a few years ago, when the Lib Dems took a lot of Scottish votes away from Labour. And things are cooking up in Scotland right now anyway with the referendum for independence coming up this fall. Politics were just starting to get interesting when we moved back to the US.

My entire family is Republican. While I can't identify completely with the Democrats, I can identify with them a whole lot more than the Republicans. Democrats are centrists, even slightly right leaning, in UK terms. Republicans are next door neighbors to the far right fringe end of the Conservatives and the Tea Party? BFFs with the fascist BNPs.

All that to say, for a British citizen (Scott) and a former British resident (me), being Democrat is pretty rational.

(Yes, there are other independent parties in the US. Unfortunately, the US two party system barely allows for these independent parties to get any recognition. And unfortunately, most of these independent parties are utter loonies anyway. I do hope for a day when the two-party system can open up like the British system to allow seats in Congress and even perhaps the Presidency to be held by a number of non-Republican, non-Democratic, new party leaders.)

(Even if that means a looney gets a seat.)

Anyway, I had a point when I started writing here, which I have veered a nice little ways away from it. I came here talk about same-sex marriage.

So, I've never had a major problem with gay people or gay marriage. All the years I was a Christian, I believed the homosexual lifestyle was wrong, but if someone wanted to live it, it didn't affect me at all. It wasn't my problem or my concern. I believed people were born with a "tendency" towards being gay, but that God could "deliver" them out of it, much like people born with tendencies toward alcoholism or violence could be delivered. When asked about it, I was truthful that I believed it was a sin, but that was between them and God, and really had very little to do with me, unless you personally wanted my prayer. Furthermore, I never went so far to say that gay people were going to hell, just that their actions displeased God. But we all displease God with our actions, we are all sinners, and I didn't see the sin of homosexuality to be any different than my own sins of gossip, occasionally drinking too much, and pride. A gay person could be a Christian, albeit a deceived one, but still eligible for salvation, as far as I could tell.

So even in my evangelical days, if someone asked what I thought about same-sex marriage, my answer was always, "I don't." Just let them get married. What's the big deal? It doesn't affect me.

This stance began to change though. Over the years, as the subject gained greater media and societal attention, I observed the pain that the debate, and the issue of homosexuality itself, was causing my gay friends. I had friends who had to choose between their careers in the military or happiness with the love of their lives. I saw friends cut off from their families and/or communities. People I knew, friends, even extended family members were being heralded as immoral, licentious, shameless degenerates on the sole grounds of who they loved. While from a Biblical standpoint, I still couldn't say it wasn't sinful, I was very certain they were entitled to the same rights as anyone else, and absolutely did not deserve to be hated, attacked, treated as lepers or burned at the stake like the Salem witches (who also didn't deserve such a fate). I heard careless, flippant comments by straight people complaining that they didn't get any special rights or attention for being straight, that they didn't feel the need to declare to the world their sexual orientation, so why did "those people" feel the need to?

Because you don't have to declare anything. You can hold hands with your husband and your two-point-five biological children in public and not receive a second glance. You have the luxury of silently declaring your sexual orientation every day in everything you do with zero retribution. You don't need special rights or attention, because you already have them.

Why do homosexuals feel the need to "declare" their sexual orientation? Could it be because they have spent years, if not decades, pretending to be something they are not, being bullied by the peers and castigated (quite possibly physically) by their parents and other adults, and just want to finally break free from all that bondage? Or perhaps, maybe some of them are actually "declaring" nothing. Maybe they are just walking hand and hand like you are, but you see that as flaunting something, declaring their sexual orientation, when really, they are just quietly living their everyday lives.

Either way, I realized my "live and let live" stance wasn't going to cut it. No one's was. If I wanted to see equal rights for all law-abiding people, it was going to take an actual stance. A pro-same-sex marriage stance.

This, of course, conflicted with my religious beliefs to an extent. I started defining my position as "morally opposed but legislatively in favor". As my faith slowly disintegrated, this stance disintegrated with it, into simply "in favor", for the supposed immorality of it had been tightly intertwined with religion and nothing else. However, the "morally opposed but legislatively in favor" is the position I wish more evangelicals took.

It's impossible - actually, no it's not impossible, it's just difficult - for an Evangelical Christian, or a member of any religion that objects to homosexuality to look at it from a strictly human rights perspective. It's difficult, because Christians (in particular) believe they own the rights to marriage, or at least their religion does. They believe that God created marriage, and therefore God has the sole say on how it is administered.

(If this was true, why are Christians allowing members of other religions to marry each other? And why are they allowing divorce?)

God created marriage between a man and a woman, they maintain. Therefore marriage between a man and a man or a woman and a woman is against God's law.

Okay, fine, we'll grant you that belief. We'll even grant you the belief that homosexuals going against this plan are going to hell. You are welcome to believe that. "It's a free country", Americans love to say.

And that's the point.

It's a free country for you to think gays are going to hell. And it's a free country for gays to be gay. And therefore, it should be a free country for gays to get married.

Our country is not, despite what is touted through the right-wing media, a "Christian country". It was founded on freedom of religion, the freedom to believe or not believe whatever one wants. Our forefathers may have been primarily made up of deists and various brands of Christian, from Anglican to Unitarian, (though not all, Jefferson, for instance, had decidedly very un-Christian beliefs), but they were clear that this is NOT a "Christian" nation. America is not a theocracy. The Christian definition of marriage should not be the only definition in a country where freedom from such restraints used to be our crowning glory.

Christians and other religious people, or people simply anti-gay (I am purposely steering clear of the word "homophobic" because while it is a correct description for many anti-gay people, it isn't quite fair on all of them), have further reasons they use against same-sex marriage. They believe that it is detrimental to society and detrimental to children. I can only assume, since this was never a position I totally understood, that that is position comes from the stereotypical concept that kids need both a motherly mother and a fatherly father to get the balance right. While I rarely see that stereotype play out perfectly in even heterosexual marriages, I assume the assumption is that in same-sex marriages, kids miss out on one or the other.

The profound misconception here is that women always act like "women" and men always act like "men". Therefore, in a heterosexual couple, there are equal and opposite traits that culminate in a completely wholesome companionship.

This speaks to absolutely nothing of the truth or reality.

In heterosexual couples, you have women who can be described as having one or many of these stereotypically male traits: domineering, authoritarian, outspoken, unemotional, tough, competitive, sexually aggressive. Men can be described in stereotypically feminine ways: nurturing, gentle, soft-spoken, irrational, emotional, submissive, accepting. Some couples are so similar that there is hardly any opposing characteristics; both man and wife can be calm, gentle, soft-spoken, passive and nurturing with no authoritarianism, outspokenness, aggressiveness, or, say, confidence. Conversely, some couples are both domineering, assertive, loud, imposing, authoritarian, strict and judgmental, with no signs of gentleness, irrationality, softness or perhaps compassion. All of these are, of course, generalizations, but they hopefully get the point across.

Again, I'm speculating, but I assume the Father-Mother scenario assumes a give-and-take of masculine and feminine traits that round out a family. This is simply not the case in many, if not most, relationships.

And in homosexual couples, the scale isn't tipped the other way. Two women do not equal two emotional roller-coasters and door mats. Two men do not equal two dictators and workhorses. Same sex or different sex - at the end of the day, it's just two individuals coming together to form a partnership. Some are great matches, some are bad ones.

There is also that study that was in the media a while back, claiming that children with homosexual parents fared worse than children with heterosexual relationships. This would be compelling indeed, if the study had been a good one. As it turns out, it was a terrible study that pretty much just showed what we already knew - children from broken families fared worse than children with families intact. Turns out, it had pretty much nothing to do with whether the parents were gay or not, but still together or not.

So, in a few short words, yes, it's complicated. Sort of. It's extremely difficult to untangle oneself from the net of cognitive dissonance. It's easier to hold to the black and white than to sift through the many shades of grey (no reference to that awful book intended). But really, it's not a complicated matter. People should have the right to marry who they love, as long as both parties involved are consenting adults. It only gets complicated when people make it that way, trying to create slippery slopes and outlandish resulting outflows. (That's not to say deciphering all the possible outcomes is wrong. Legislation definitely needs to be written in such a way that it does not inadvertently allow for things that would be problematic.)

It may clash with your religious beliefs. You have the right to dislike it. But two total strangers getting married only affects you insomuch that you may possibly one day have to explain why Jonny has two mommies to your child. It does not creep into your marriage and defile it. It really has very little, if anything, to do with you at all.

But it means everything to the people who want to marry and can't, who want to express their undying love for each other by committing to a lifelong union, for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. Who want to know their best friend and soul mate will be cared for financially when they die through life insurance plans and inheritance. Who want to be parents, who want to be parents that raise their kids in a secure home, with family health care policies and legal custody for both parents, and no discrimination.

For you, it's about a religious principle and someone else's possible afterlife. For them, it's about basic human rights and their own quite literal, very tangible day-to-day experiences.

If affects you little. It affects them in every way. Isn't there a way to be morally opposed, but legislatively in favor?