A couple of days ago I received a message from someone I don’t know, in that fashion that some people use sometimes to communicate with people they feel connected to but not quite enough that they can directly communicate: A facebook status message.

I’m old; I prefer the gold standard email, or text message.

Anyway, the message was clear: someone was defending someone else from judgmental remarks I made here in this blog and on my facebook status. (because isn’t that how we present ourselves to the world? through our facebook status?)

She made me think; why do I consider my form of judgment more valid than what I see around me? Because I’m right? I think that’s part of it for sure.

The fact is that there will never come a day when I can sit down with the Nassau County Superintendent and discuss why he doesn’t believe in dinosaurs, and why he thinks my daughter should be allowed some of the rights of her fellow high schoolers, but not all of them. And I’ll never have coffee with Dennis Todd to discuss his contention that homosexuality is depraved and dangerous and GSA clubs lead to mental illness in teens. I don’t sit down with a white supremacist to discuss race relations. Why should I? We’ll never come together on any of this, and when the depth of someone’s reasoning for an oppressive belief system is “god said so”, we’re looking at a pretty short coffee date.

I feel a little like, hasn’t this ground been covered? Why should I respect your POV when it is so clearly wrong, and damages humanity as a whole?

I feel very conflicted. My ideas are well formed and established. I’m not ever going to change my mind about reproductive rights, or capitalism, or health care reform, or racism. At the same time I find myself in a position to decide where tolerance ends and respect begins- whether there is a difference between tolerance and acceptance, and whether I’m able to look past a set of values so completely different from my own and create a relationship with someone whose core beliefs I find fundamentally wrong.

I don’t know. It makes me wonder how my family tolerates being in the same room with us ever.

I would like to update that after the incident the other night, we spent an evening with TeenHer’s boyfriend, during which I discovered that I do still like the kid, that he’s very curious and inquisitive in a way that makes me happy and hopeful, and that the guy really does seem to care about my daughter. I’m interested to see where this takes them.