Intolerance of Intolerance

So I'm now living in a community where they made a bonfire out of copies of Rudolfo Anaya's book "Bless Me, Ultima." It happened a couple of years ago. Certain people found the book's content disturbing because the story deals with Pagan subject matter and is about a Pagan heroine, and they didn't want their children being exposed to such "evil." This, despite the town librarian's staunch defense of the book. It chills me to my marrow to reflect on how this echoes, however symbolically, the horrors of The Burning Times. And they call this a liberal community. Pah!

I can just imagine the preachers behind their Sunday pulpits, ignorantly urging their congregations to oppose the teaching of Witchcraft. Without having read the book themselves, of course, to even know what it was about.

My reactions, since finding this out, have varied from shock to paranoid fear about being an openly Pagan woman in this community. Now I'm just mad. And it's coloring my experience of the town I'm helping to cover as a journalist. When I ride the bus into Telluride, I am constantly hearing conversations about church or Big Christian Daddy. I watch people who have these conversations treating people of lower socioeconomic statuses like pariahs, sometimes going so far as to snicker and whisper indiscreetly, while casting glances in the direction of whomever they're mocking, and all I can do is shoot daggers at them through my eyes and fume inwardly, while fantasizing about how good it would feel to beat the nastiness out of them. Those are my darker moments.

I know there are tolerant, loving Christians out there. I went to college with quite a few, and I've known others since. But why is it that the intolerant ones are breeding like bunnies in small towns?

As heavy as some of my feelings are, I see this emergence of anger as a positive step in my development. I remember being ridiculed and tormented for being a dyke in high school, and how the ostracism and cruelty stung, and how I dreaded each school day more and more as graduation approached. I stood up to those bullies as much as I could, confronting them on more than one occasion, and I walked with my head high and shoulders back, but I was always afraid inside, always, that another attack was imminent. Anger has now replaced my fear, and as nebulous as the relationships between all these events of intolerance are, I am growing up past fear and finding my outrage.

And that in itself is a healing. That itself is a gift.