It Might Be Time To Cut My Right-Wing, Trump-Loving In-Laws Out Of My Kids' Lives

[Demovictory9]

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-cutting-off-relatives_n_5d448ed4e4b0ca604e31f5ba

“I don’t understand why anyone lives in Los Angeles,” my mother-in-law said to my husband over the phone a few months ago. “It’s full of immigrants.”

This offensive “observation” was not a stand-alone comment. It was only the latest in a series of bigoted sound bites from my in-laws. Both in their 70s, they live on Florida’s Gulf Coast in a predominantly white, older community saturated by conservative talking points. They see themselves as tolerant, life-loving Catholics. But their tolerance extends only to people they know and understand ― and those people are white, straight, “American” people.


Actually, it isn’t just racism that muddies the water in my relationship with my in-laws. It’s sexism and homophobia, too. Sometimes, it’s even veiled anti-Semitism. (Note to non-Jews everywhere: Telling a Jewish person how much you love Jewish people is, on its face, a message of marginalization.) My father-in-law once had to leave the room when two men kissed on TV. “Disgusting,” he whispered under his breath, within earshot of my son.

My in-laws have always been conservative. They have always been Republican. But, before 2016, they were Catholics devoted, specifically, to the “problem” of abortion. That was the issue they cared about, and it was the issue that ignited their ballot box passion. What my husband and I have witnessed, however, has been an ideological shift, from a relationship with religion to blind idolatry.

In the past two years, fueled by a president who “tells it like it is,” my in-laws have said a spate of problematic, objectionable and, often, straight-up hateful things. My sweet mother-in-law, who cries at the very notion of a dog’s death, wanted to know why Senate hopeful Roy Moore’s teenaged accusers didn’t come forth with their claims sooner, thereby dismissing their claims. When my 1-year-old threw a tantrum and I accused him of being a “drama queen,” she gently corrected me: “It’s drama king.”

My father-in-law clucked when, in a scene in the movie “Moonlight,” an impoverished Black drug dealer pulled up in a decked-out low-rider. It was an expensive car, and my father-in-law wanted us to know that people of that sort were always spending above their means. “That’s just what they do,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s just what they do.” He meant Black people ― all of them.

[lapfog_1]

1. Long Past... I did it back when Shrub was selected...

don't miss any of them... they only ever called when they wanted money anyway

[MicaelS]

2. Great article. Thanks for posting. n/t

[RAB910]

3. If you want your children to grow up with a good set of values

then... YES

[demosincebirth]

4. Ask them if they would adopt and take care of a child that was born in poverty when the mother

could not get an abortion.

[Aristus]

6. I would have cut them loose a long time ago.

Mrs. Aristus and I cut loose my step-daughter's toxic in-laws the day after Trump was handed the White House.

Life's too short...

[stillcool]

7. we humans are all...

teachers and students. What we learn is what we teach. I guess everyone has to learn sometime, about ignorance and hatred. The problem is when no one points out that what we are learning isn't right, isn't true, isn't real. Lies have kept me in therapy for years. I can't imagine what it must be like to grow-up in these times.

[Baitball Blogger]

8. Without realizing it, I set an example for my daughter.

In the nineties I began to drift away from my husband's family. His brother used the "N" word, which crossed the line for me. They had always been suspect of being racists, but until that moment I wasn't sure. Then it began to add up. Daughters were dating hardcore right-leaning young men and the family conversations were less than left.

I started by looking for excuses to avoid the family gatherings, though it was not a secret that I didn't feel welcome. My kids would go to the family events, until I began to take over our own family holidays.

Today, we never see the kids from my husband's siblings, but the gatherings with adults is cordial - unless we talk politics.

Jump twenty years and now my daughter is married to a nice young man, who happens to have a racist father. Worse than anything I had to deal with. They plan to have children and my daughter is freaking out because she doesn't want her children to be exposed to that level of racist conversation. She knows what she has to do.

Yes, I think it's time to make it clear that racist relatives are destroying family relationships, and it has been going on since the nineties.

It will continue this way until someone manages to provide balanced news to offset the brainwashing that goes on in FoxNews.