On The Soapbox: Marriage, Race and God

I don't normally climb up on my soap box and preach, but this week I have three times been poked just hard enough to make that climb.  I am sure I will get a lot of hacked off readers for this, but the beauty of it all is I really don't care.

I loathe politics.  I am neither red or blue and I think politicians lie.  The other day I read some diatribe written by some dude that proclaims to be just to the right of republican.  His beef?  Gay marriage.  I refuse to reassemble his arguments here but suffice it to say his bottom line is that gay marriage is sick, immoral and disobedient to God. His platform included a proclamation to Republicans that if they were true Republicans, they would agree.  I don't remember the guy's name and I wouldn't print it if I did because I do not want to support anything he says.  If I were a Republican, I would be appalled that he is single handedly undermining the more relevant issues of the Republican platform.  I would stand up for the more critical issues of my party and leave love alone.  Love is not heterosexual and it is not partisan.

Cheerios has a commercial where a little girl asks her mom if Cheerios is good for the heart because daddy said it was.  The mother confirms - yes it is.  The little girl then goes to her father napping on the couch and pours a box of Cheerios on his chest (knowing that is where his heart is located.)  Cute?  You bet.  I love that commercial.  I saw it at least three times before it registered that the couple is bi-racial and the beautiful little girl is of mixed race.  I loved the commercial even more.  However, there has been a very public backlash against this commercial - name calling, complaints, outright proclamations of disgust.  I am shocked and disappointed. I thought we, humanity, had evolved from that.  And I wonder - IF the parents were both Caucasian and the little girl bi-racial;  the unspoken message that the couple had adopted her, would it THEN be acceptable?  Love isn't race specific.

Finally, I had a discussion with a friend who is heavily involved in her church.  I admire her dedication to her church family, I respect her deeply held beliefs.  She believes that those who have not accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior as the ONLY way to salvation are damned to hell. And that's where we part.  I believe in God but I no longer attend any churches or belong to a specific religion.  I was once asked by a pastor why I had not become a member of the church I attended for quite a few years.  I told him that I could not stand up and proclaim that Jesus is the ONLY way to God.  I cannot believe that a loving God would create so many vastly different, beautiful people and cultures, so many different belief systems, only to make the sweeping majority wrong in the end.  The more I think about it, the more I feel like organized religion is a function of the mortal demand to manage God.  If God is love, He loves us all.

I do not feel a need to back-up my beliefs with Bible quotes, philosophical arguments or political facts.  It's what I believe and I don't have to justify it to anyone.  That is freedom.

Judi Coltman is an author of mystery books.  She is currently working on her fourth novel.  Follow her at 
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A Drive Down Memory Lane

An entire genre of music has been created in it's honor.  Movies have been made about it.  Books have been penned in its name.  A boy, a girl and a vacation location (mine is the beach. . .see my book).  In one week’s time, during the freedom of the summer, a teen aged girl could live out an entire lifetime of love from Saturday to Saturday.   It is the summer love and the beauty of it was, it only really lasted a week until the next year.  In our case, there were two very special boys, that Steph and I spent time with every year from the time I was 13 until 17.  The years when we were particularly cute, thin and young.  

Last year, I had the good fortune to get in contact with one of the boys (Steph’s “love”) and was pleased to find out he was married with children and still lived at the beach.  Well, ok.  I already knew he still lived at the beach. You see, Stephie and I have stalked him year after year, driving by his house, looking to make sure the name was still on the mailbox, daring one another to go to the door and say hello.  We never follow through. And so it was, this year that we hopped in an electric golf cart and traveled back down Memory Lane once again.

It was my intention to show Stephie how successful her Boy had become.  He now owns several houses at the beach, many of them back up to a freshwater lake once called The Pits.  

We met The Boys in 1972, at the Pits actually, when one of them road his bike down the dirt path and into the lake - stark naked.  Had we been any younger we might have needed therapy to get beyond the incident, but hormones had already kicked in and it didn’t take long for us to get to know The Boys.  We were young, bikini'd, and barefoot . We squeezed lemon juice into our hair to give it highlights and bathed in baby oil to enhance our tans.  And for a whole week, we didn’t wear shoes.  The Boys were long haired, deeply tanned and they surfed.  We thought they were gorgeous. The parents nicknamed them The Munchkins - which was better than Snort and Grunt (the back-up beach boyfriends).

Our first official date a was homemade dinner.  My boy enlisted his Italian father to cook us an authentic Italian lasagna and set us up with a little candle lit table.  Stephie was so nervous that she could not eat.  I never had that problem.  After the dinner, they drove us down to the public beach at the very south end and we caught ghost crabs, walked on the beach and kissed.  We kissed a lot.

My father always believed that The Boys had a different set of girlfriends every week.  We always believed WE were the only girls they saw and that their summer wasn’t complete until we arrived. Perhaps we were delusional, but we have elevated those hormonal memories to historic proportions, creating epic stories from what amounted to no more than six weeks from our collective lives.  Those Boys are icons in our lexicon, archetypes in our stories and legends in our own minds.  

So what happens when a drive down Memory Lane brings traffic you weren’t expecting?

To Be Continued. . .