I know I’ve mentioned this, but this holiday pays homage to those who were victimized by superstition.

Bub’s father and his grandmother on that side of the family attempted to coerce me into converting to Catholicism, even going so far as to rush me into filling out forms for RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults). I was never once asked how I felt about religion, or their religion. Not once was I asked if I even wanted to convert to their religion. To this day, I still remember something that Bub’s paternal grandmother said to me — “everyone has their own journey to God”, or something to that effect. No, you just expected me to roll over and die, to convert to your family’s religion because it was your family’s religion because you were going to use it as the battering ram to control me, then you were going to use it as the means to shotgun wed me to your son to “erase the sin of our child being born out of wedlock”, and then you expected me to have child after child that I did not want because your religion forbade contraception. And when I died, as I would have due to the health concerns that I had that would have caused pregnancy to imperil me, “it would have been God’s will”, because all you would have seen me as would have been your son’s incubator.

Not once was I asked if I even wanted to attend the Masses and church functions that I was literally drug to.

I told your son that I did not want to attend these things, that I did not want to convert, and look where that got me. Look exactly how far that got me, until I outed myself to your (deacon? priest? pastor?), and the people that I needed to out myself to in order to extricate myself from the whole situation. I shouldn’t have needed to go nuclear to be treated with a modicum of decent human respect, and I should have been asked about these things long before it got to that point. I was victimized by everything that led up to that point…