Easter temptation

On the morning of Easter Sunday, the world presented me with a golden opportunity to destroy someone’s life. I powered up the computer, which I normally do not do on Sundays, because I needed to send people an agenda for a meeting on Monday night. In my e-mail I noticed that there were a few messages from Facebook. I had made a comment about someone’s status update on Friday afternoon, and whenever someone else – anyone else – comments on the same status update, the comment is automatically forwarded to my e-mail. As long as the computer was up and running, I decided to just go ahead and open Facebook and have a look. I am ‘friends’ with a few anti-religious posters, and I wanted to see if there was anything juicy. It was Easter morning, after all.

And that’s when I saw this: Lois (not her real name) became a fan of Pastor Rick Warren

It is amazing to me how I react to things like this. How could anyone I know on any level become a fan of one of the world’s most legitimized homo haters and, at the same time, consider me a friend, if only on Facebook? My initial reaction is an intense blend of pain and horror, and it’s so consistent year after year that I’m tempted to call it reassuring. But Lois thinking it's okay to declare her admiration for someone who thinks gays are a lower life form than others is only the beginning.

Lois and I met in the early 1990s when we were both working for a research department at a very large, very prestigious university in a state that prides itself on its liberal politics. Lois and I became friendly. She met my boyfriend. I met her husband, and her dogs. We exchanged recipes and gossip. There was all sorts of intrigue in that office – I’ve yet to work in one where there’s not – and we stayed on top of all of it, including uncovering, in the days before Google, the fact that the guy who administered the grant funding was a convicted embezzler.

One of the strange things about Lois was that she’d been married to her husband for many years, but, according to her, the two of them never had sex. I’m not sure if this next bit of information is a cause or an effect of the husband situation, but Lois did not go without: she had sex with other men. She had a Ph.D. in education, and had been chosen to travel around the country to make site visits and write up evaluation reports, which I did for her, on the progress of federal grant programs. I helped her pick which site visits she was going to make, which were chosen in order for her to be in the same town at the same time as Willard (not his real name), another evaluator, who was also married. Willard’s wife, Vivian (not her real name) was dying of cancer in a hospice. I apologize for sounding like a Republican (although I’d be in good company if I were to sign on to Rick Warren’s fan page, which has more than 55,000 members) but these shenanigans were financed by the U.S. taxpayers. Eventually, the guy whose wife was dying of cancer grew tired of hotel encounters with Lois and called it off. Lois got furious and threw a few floppy discs – remember those? – at the wall, and stomped out of her job at the university.

And moved two time zones away, where her husband rented her an apartment. It was a comfortable, tidy little place for Lois to live and “sort things out” and “recover from the breakdown.” She lived in the apartment for three and half years, and she shared it, of course, with yet another married man, but he too eventually grew tired, and who could blame him, of having to disappear every couple of months or so when Lois’ husband came to town for a visit. When, with a bit of persuasion from the legal system, the live-in returned to his wife Lois had another breakdown and moved back home to her husband, where she’s been living ever since, working on her quilting and her knitting and becoming a fan of a guy who helped bring the phrase “one man, one woman” into the nation’s vocabulary as he attempted, successfully, to ensure that people like Lois can enjoy all the privileges of marriage while people like me cannot.

So my question is this: what should I do? I think it would be fun to post a response to her public declaration of support for Rick Warren that would go like this: Hey Lois, how’s Willard? Did his wife die? Are you guys back together again? I think it would be fun to expose her hypocrisy, right in front of her husband, her mother, her neighbors, her fellow church goers, anyone and everyone who’s part of her Facebook page and may entertain even the slightest notion that Lois is in any way honorable in her marriage, or her career for that matter. I think it would be fun to ruin her. But a big part of my attempt to become a better person is that I am trying to honestly examine my motives, and the only motive I can think of thus far for responding to her very stupid move in the way it deserves is my desire to be mean to her on a personal level. How dare she support – if only in the fakest of ways – someone who wants to legislate me into second-class citizenship? And that, of course, is where I keep getting stuck. I’d like to wreck her marriage, and I’d enjoy poisoning any professional credibility she has left, but not because I think it would do any good, or that anyone, including me, would learn anything, but because I actually think it would be fun, which worries me almost more than her brazen arrogance.