So long to the holidays

Merry Christmas, my ass. My mother woke me up this morning by placing a new Teflon pan on my bed ("Merry Christmas! I found this pot for you!") and then turning up the Korean historical drama series she likes to watch to an ear-splitting volume so that my 82 year-old grandmother could enjoy the hanyu histrionics better. Except for two Jesus and Mary dolls that, for some reason, remain swaddled in the foam wrap used to protect them when they were stored in boxes, so that only their holy heads emerge from their foam robes, and so they look like grotesquely obese porcelain hippies in wildly ill-fitting bubble geese, my family's putative Catholicism finds no expression on this sacred day. Well, there's a few frighteningly large crucifixes over the living room and master bedroom doors and some New World Translations of the Holy Scriptures, but beyond that, our house is Jehovah-free.

I think my family is Catholic. I was raised Jehovah's Witness, but quit the church over a decade ago. (I was gay, they were boring.) My mom bought a Buddha carving when we were in Taiwan in 1988, but she bought it because when you upended the Buddha and placed your nostrils to his ass, the tea tree wood from which it was created smelled fresh, not for any religious reasons. When I was much younger, at that age where I could still sit on Santa's lap without crushing his femur or raising specters of Humbert Humbert by the poolside, I accompanied my grandmother to Christmas eve services at her all-Chinese Catholic Church. The kids went to a separate room and I had no idea what was happening. All the kids in the know lined up at a designated time to receive the host, which looked so tasty and otherworldly that to this day I regret not queuing up when everyone else did. The blood of Our Lord was deep purple grape juice, and I shied away from that; too many stories from Bernice, my Jehovah's Witness mentor, about evil people who threw their hosts into the toilet and suddenly found their entire septic systems flooded with blood. Eech.

I also distinctly recall resenting the fraudulent Santa, who was Chinese-American and forty years old. No white plastic beard could've hidden your black eyebrows, buddy. And sucks to the cheap baubles you handed out from your sack.

Something I've been dwelling on: according to the Edison Research/Mitofsky exit polls from the November election, fifteen percent of all voters say they never attend church but 29% of all self-identified lesbian, gay, and bisexual voters say they never do. Why is this? Perhaps LGB voters are not as religious as their non-LGB counterparts? But the facts do not show this. Comparable percentages of LGB voters identify themselves as Protestant/Other Christian (49% of LGB voters vs. 54% of all voters), Catholic (23% vs. 27%), Jewish (4% vs 3%), or "Something else" (9% vs. 6%). Fourteen percent of LGB voters have no religion, compared to 10% of all voters.

So what gives? There doesn't seem to be a demand problem, since similar percentages of LGB people and all voters claim to belong to some religion. Is it a supply problem? Are there simply no churches that LGB voters feel comfortable belonging to? This is an important question to tackle, since its answer may help us find policies that bolster LGB-affirming churches and that eventually help us wrest the "moral values" mantle back from the right-wing marketing geniuses that have monopolized the idea. Our options are to flee the churches and congregate in the cities--my personal choice--or to march back into the churches and demand that we be treated as God's children ought to be treated. Seventy-three percent of America believes in angels; we'll never convert all these people to secular humanism, so we might as be strategic with the hand we've been dealt.