Friday, September 15, 2006

Locked In the Heritic’s Confessional

Posted by olvlzl

Well, I guess there is no covering that hole with the piano. I set off a bomb here last weekend. And me, a houseguest. Always putting my foot in it. I was, only trying to blend in with the decor.

When answering the casting call for a weekend fill-in here I knew it would be a challenge. First there was the fact that it would be a man filling-in on a feminist blog. Being well past the age where anyone could keep a straight face with me playing Ophelia, I knew it would have to be a pants role.

But that was only the first hurdle. There was the high standard to get over. Everyone knows that Echidne’s is a place where the interesting and unexpected is always happening, no cookie cutter angst here. And I did make an effort to blend in. I know that it’s rude to stick out like a sore thumb. My mother raised me the right way. You mind your manners and don’t come out of the bathroom complaining about your host’s taste in ornaments. Echidne’s are divine, by the way. As I said I made an effort, a really serious one. I can prove it. Didn’t I learn another language? I had to. Everyone knows that Echidne writes in ESL, if you don’t know, that stands for English as a Sensible Language. It might not be something that everyone gets but it’s the house standard here.

Blogging has been a learning experience in many ways, editing, condensing, not running on past nine-hundred words or you stupify instead of enlighten. And the reader response, I mean, just full of surprises. In the past month alone I’ve been accused by a straight man of being a homophobe, I’ve had someone considerably to the right of me accuse me of being a moderate. A communist called me a fascist and the very next day an anarchist accused me of being a communist, how many of you can say that? I’ve had Republican trolls call me “batshit crazy”, stupid. You’d hardly know yourself.

But last week, to have a congregation of atheists first make that unfounded accusation that I was a Christian and then to raise fingers en masse and pointedly accuse me of heresy for visiting the temple of a minor Greek goddess, that really was the topper, I’ll tell you. It was like being publicly denounced for sorcery in 1506.

And it was so confusing, not only being called something I hadn’t called myself, a Christian, something which any number of Christians would happily tell you is impossible. But to be called not just a Christian but a Christian heretic, now that really shocked me. To have these people, these - no, THESE people file a charge of heresy! I’ve always been under the impression they approved that kind of thing.