Sorry We Missed Church

[Guest guest]

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.

 

[rest of story here]

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