My Father the Preacher
2003-04-22, 8:44 a.m.

Quiet night last night. MyLove was at work, which left me and the little doggie home alone. When I got home, he was sooo happy to see me. He was jumping all around and just so adorable!

We played for awhile, then watched American Idol. I love that show, I know I'm weird, but I do love that show.

MyLove called and said she was having some problems at work...I tried to talk to her, but she didn't really want to talk. This morning, I did not hear from her before I left for work. I'm concerned, but I don't want to call and risk waking her up. So I'll wait to hopefully hear from her this afternoon.

I spoke with my dad yesterday. My dad and I have had a bumpy relationship all my life. It started when he left me and my mom when I was a year old. Then he moved to another state and I only saw him maybe 10 times over the next 18 years. When I was 18 he came back to my home state to live. He divorced his second wife and was single. While he was single we got along great. We really started to connect. But then he met and married a woman who was very unpleasant. She was loud, opinionated, and she and my father went through the hefty inheritance that my grandfather left him in a matter of two years. Despite everything I missed my dad so I tried to get along with his wife, but it just didn't work. I was the one to always call him, he's send me holiday cards, but dammit I wanted a phone call, or a personal visit. So, eventually I got tired of keeping up my end of things, while he didn't keep up his.

Then, this past October, his wife was killed in a car accident. Since then I've called my dad every few weeks, we went to dinner once, and I've tried to be supportive for him in his loss. But still, it's been me pretty much keeping up the relationship. So now....he has joined a new church, and he calmly informs me that I can't go to the Kingdom of Heaven cause I'm gay!!

I cannot really verbalize how very much this pisses me off, for him to say that to me. All my life, he's ditched me as a daughter, failed to pay child support, and so on....and he has the gall to tell me that I'm not going to go to heaven because I'm gay. I was dumfounded when he said it.

However, I quickly recovered enough to launch in to my standard response to idiotic statements such as that. I explained to him that the bible was written in a time when people needed to populate the earth, when you couldn't eat certain meats because they couldn't be properly preserved, and so on...and that a person cannot live their life trying to stick to all the little details of that book now. But you can take the basic premise of the bible, which is to love, honor, and NOT JUDGE, your fellow man. Which is how I try to live my life. I followed that all up by saying...if I am the loving person that I am, treating people with respect, and following Jesus' examples and I get up to the pearly gates and they deny me entrance because I was gay....then I don't want to go to that place anyway.

He quickly realized that he should NOT preach to me. That I have studied the bible and I am a very spiritual person, which he'd know if he bothered to try and get to know his own daugher, and that I will never back down in a discussion such as that. My bliefs are strong and I am prepared to back them up. He was ill-prepared for my response.

We'll see if he tries that again! But needless to say, it seems that my father will find anyone or anything to keep him from getting close to me...why is that?

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