Sorry We Missed Church...

[kaygore]

Sorry We Missed Church
BY MICHAEL VENTURA

Driving 19th Street in Lubbock alongside the sprawling edifices of
Texas Tech, the little tin-can car in front of me sported quite a
bumper sticker: SORRY WE MISSED CHURCH, WE WERE BUSY/LEARNING
WITCHCRAFT AND BECOMING LESBIANS.

That bumper sticker won't cost you in Los Angeles or Austin, but it
takes rare nerve to paste those words on your tail in the Bible Belt.
(Lubbock has, I am told, more churches per capita than any city
anywhere.) The tin can had Texas plates, and any Texan knows that
sticker won't be taken lightly around here. I had to see who was
driving that car. I pulled up alongside. The driver and her passenger
were women of about 18, maybe 20. They wore tractor hats or maybe
baseball caps, with brims pulled backwards, and they were laughing.
They didn't notice me salute them, and they couldn't know that I was
thinking, Next to these kids, I'm a wuss.

I write under the ever-flimsier protection of the First Amendment.
They drive around a famously right-wing town daring anyone to say them
nay.

Those young women surely know that cops may pull them over on any
pretext. And they must know that – coming out of a movie, say – they
might find their car surrounded by a gaggle of repressed guys in
desperate need to prove themselves real men. To the surprise of many,
Brokeback Mountain is playing in Lubbock – the sight of a cowboy hat
will never be quite the same, will never quite mean what it used to
mean. There are lots of cowboy hats hereabouts, many no doubt a little
less sure of their image because of Brokeback Mountain (they won't see
the film, but they'll see the previews). Insecure cowboy wannabes
won't take that sticker lightly. But, unlike most Americans these
days, those young women weren't letting fear set their limits.

Your freedom may be backed by law, but your freedom can't be given you
by law. You give it to yourself by how far you're willing to go. You
give it to yourself by what stakes you're willing to play for. Do your
loved ones – or your town, or your country – limit how free you are by
what they can and cannot tolerate? How much of that are you willing to
take? Is your freedom limited by your own fear? In this case, the
freedom we're talking about is basic: the freedom to be oneself.
That's what these women were putting to the test – testing themselves,
testing their society. And risking all kinds of hell to do it. East
and West Coast writers pontificating about "the red states" don't
imagine that those very states are also places of the purest
rebellions, where rebels walk their talk on tightropes.


http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2006-02-17/cols_ventura.html