WHY DIDN'T I JUST SAY NO...
... AND LISTEN?

While I was having blood drawn for a cholesterol check, the lovely young woman who had successfully and painlessly found an appropriate vein asked me where she could get one of the Obama buttons I was wearing. She also wanted to talk about the NO on PROPOSITION 8 message I had stuck on my shirt alongside the Obama button. The young woman and I agreed that no couple should be denied the civil right to marry.

Another employee of the medical department, a lady wearing a lab coat, stepped around a partition to interrupt our conversation by saying, “You know they are going to be teaching it in the schools if Proposition 8 doesn’t pass.”

I asked who “they” are and what “it” is. She said, “You know they are already getting it ready to include in textbooks. They’re already doing it in San Francisco and Massachusetts.”

I asked again, “Who are they and what is it?”

She looked baffled. I then did what I should not have done. I didn’t even give her a chance to answer. I regret that I launched a verbal attack on her. It probably only hardened her already firmly set determination to believe that she and California and perhaps all of America are under threat of siege by dangerous, subversive forces, an army led by Satan. I asked her if she knew what “bearing false witness” means. I said I was sure she knew well that bearing false witness is lying because it must be one of the things mentioned in sermons and Sunday School lessons in her church. I didn’t wait for her to say anything but went on with my attack. I said I could guess that she is a member of a fundamentalist church, either evangelical or Roman Catholic, and that she has been told lies which she is repeating. Of course, I pulled myself up to my full six-foot-plus height and towered over this little woman, who, by the way, didn’t back away. I said that I had seen the same television ads she has seen and that those ads are blatantly false; that they are outright, deliberate lies designed to deceive and scare people.

I was right about the ads, but I was wrong in my approach. Later I wished I had asked her to explain why she believed as she did. I wished I had listened to her story. I wished I had not mentioned her church. I wished that I had not cut off discussion by insisting that she is wrong and that I am right. I wished that I had not assumed a bullying male posture. I hope I won’t make the same mistake again by using a hostile response but that I will find a way to empathize in a sympathetic, kind way the invalidity of the misleading television ads designed to support proposition eight. I blew my chance to talk with her.