My Dad, “Bleeding Heart Liberals” & Those Of Us In The Middle

My dad makes me giggle even as he confounds me as to what political party he subscribes to the most. Growing up, I thought my parents were Republicans. Certainly, I thought they were conservatives. My father was a government employee and he took that seriously. He said he had been instructed not to discuss his political positions or advocate any particular candidate and he stuck to it. It’s only been in the last few years that my father and I have had in-depth political discussions.

My father has been a series of surprises to me over the years. He doesn’t think suicide should be illegal and advocates assisted suicide. He thinks drugs should be made legal but would probably ground me (a 30-something) for life if he thought I’d so much as been near a nonprescribed narcotic. He thinks prostitution should be legalized and regulated. He didn’t vote for Clinton or Bush. He’s for the woman’s right to choose and in separation of church and state. He believes in God and in doing the right thing and is a Christian but I don’t know the last time he went to church. He is against the War in Iraq and never thought there were weapons of mass destruction. In fact, he thinks we invaded Iraq because we needed to keep a war going. My dad was an Army Captain who served state-side during the Vietnam War and he married an Air Force brat, who’s father flew in that same war as well as many others. My father believes only married people should be intimate and he once made my uncle stay in a hotel with his girlfriend because they couldn’t sleep in the same bed in his house. Yet he bought me alcohol years before I was legal (probably because he thought if they made it not such a big deal then I wouldn’t waste so much time trying to sneak out and get drunk like my friends). My father seems to generally believe that as long as you aren’t hurting anyone, what’s the big deal?

Tonight on the phone, I mentioned to my dad that I’d seen on the CNN.com that the governor of New Mexico had declared a state emergency due to issues with a rise in crime due to illegal immigrants coming across the border. (Since we now live in states I didn’t grow up in, we try to keep up with each others’ news. Gives us something to talk about.) What followed was a discussion I won’t much get into here because well, for the most part I agree with him and I have a migraine, but the gist is that my dad feels that the immigrants are crossing the border are coming here looking for work for the most part and the way to put a stop to it is to start fining those employers who employ illegal immigrants. Of course, to do that we have to do things like investigate the payrolls and employee lists. We have to stop city and state governments that want to give illegal aliens driver’s licenses and the right to vote — giving them a license won’t make them a better driver. If they can register for either, then they can be caught and shipped back home.

What made me giggle was that my dad said we could do all of this but for those “bleeding heart liberals” who are worried about the immigrants’ rights and treatment and also the government wouldn’t want to upset the businessmen. I had to giggle because while I know neither he nor I think either of us is a “bleeding heart liberal”, I know there are many out there that think we are. O.K. I admit I’m probably closer to being a tree-hugging, peace-loving hippie-type liberal than he is, but I know we’re both liberals and it was funny to hear him say it.

The truth is that I don’t think the majority of the country is full of “bleeding heart liberals” or “religious right-wing nuts”. I think most of us are in the middle somewhere. We all have our opinions based on our life experiences and some of us are just a bit more stubborn about them than others. Certainly a lot of us are passionate about certain issues. Some of us sell our souls to tow the party line and see the issues as black and white while others see things as more flexible, more gray with maybe a little blue and pink in there somewhere.

tags: liberals, Republicans, politics, immigration

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