I grew up in the Deep South, a member of a conservative Catholic family.

My family wasn’t ultra conservative, but conservative enough. My dad let it be known he voted Republican. My mother didn’t talk much about her voting habits, but I always assumed she was voting like my dad was. My dad probably assumed the same thing. I’m sure his belief that my mother agreed with him increased family harmony.

I remember my dad talking shit on unions. He explained unions to me by saying if a company was unionized, the owner of the company couldn’t hire the people he (of course the owner of any company must be a man) wanted to hire. Let me be clear. My father never owned a company, never came close to being a member of the owning class. Why he cared about a company owner’s freedom to hire nonunion workers, I have no idea. Like so many working-class Republicans, he was living with some intense cognitive dissonance.

My dad was a hardworking white man who fed his family and paid the bills with no more than a high school diploma. It never occurred to him that other people might not be able to get by with an equal amount of hard work.

My dad backed Gerald Ford in the 1976 election, so my five-year-old self supported Ford too. My kindergarten class got to vote for president. One of the teachers took a refrigerator box and hung photos of Ford and Jimmy Carter inside. We kids went into the box one at a time and put a mark next to the photo of our candidate of choice. I made my mark for Ford, because that’s what my dad would have done. Read the rest of this entry →