Fun with Fundamentalists

Earlier this week, I managed to get out of the office for lunch – a rare feat. As I was returning from a yummy Thai meal, I had a run in with a Jesus lady. Everyone’s seen Jesus ladies. They hand out religious tracts, warn you about the impending apocalypse, and then offer you salvation from eternal damnation if you take Jesus Christ as your lord and savior. This lady was a fundie with sprinkles on top. She not only had pamphlets, but she was wearing a sandwich board illustrating the plight of lost souls with a collage of aborted fetuses. I love the sandwich board fundies. The posters that they wear are really their own, unique brand of art.

I got a good look at the Jesus lady as I was standing on a sidewalk waiting to cross to her side of the street. (I find these folks oddly fascinating, if you can’t tell.) She apparently saw me staring, because when I went to pass her she exclaimed stridently, “You are going to hell if you do not take Jesus Christ into your heart!” I wanted nothing more than to turn around and say, “That’s fine with me! It’ll be easier to pick up girls there!” but I didn’t. Grace Olivia Donovan surfaced to exercise some restraint. Besides, getting her all riled up would have been too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel.

Now, you may be thinking, “This girl seems to like to write about run-ins with religious types. She seems mildly preoccupied with the subject,” and you’d be right. But in my defense, it’s because I appear to be some kind of weird magnet for encounters with the godly. The major irony in this is that I’ve been decidedly ungodly since the age of four. Yet before work every day for the first year I was out college, a fellow commuter would grin directly at me and pray the rosary while I was waiting for the train. Mormons try to convert me at least once a month. For reasons that I can’t quite figure out, I’m friends with an oddly large number of people who are either ministers or are going into the ministry. The list goes on.

I thought that I was safe from any more incidents this week after the Jesus lady encounter. Yeah…no.

Last night I headed out to a friend’s house for a small gathering. I was running early so I decided to drop into a nearby food co-op on the way to her house. I was in the market for lavender oil and was looking for a new face wash, preferably something organic, so I made my way to the health and beauty aisle.*

As I perused the hemp shampoos, a man and a woman standing behind me were talking. I wasn’t really tuned into the conversation until the woman proclaimed, “The Catholic Church has got it wrong!” This isn’t an unusual sentiment to be expressed in Boston. The area’s Catholic population has had a rough time of it lately, what with all of the sexual abuse scandals and the resulting closures of a number of local parishes. I figured that the woman was going to express her resentment of the hypocritical corruption of the Church, which is what you’d expect to hear in a store with a frozen food section entirely made up of tofu-related products.

She then said something along the lines of, “This priest told us that he was struggling with his sexuality! That’s not what you want to hear from you parish priest!” I kind of agreed, to myself. If you’re a priest, shouldn’t you try to figure these things out before you take your vows? I understand that these folks are human and things pop up unexpectedly, so to speak. I was intrigued as to where the lady was going with this, and I kept listening accordingly.

“And these new guidelines on dealing with gay parishioners! What crap!” she said, referring to the newly released standard operating procedures for priests ministering to gays that essentially restates the whole “love the sinner, hate the sin” rule. Once again, she wasn’t saying anything I didn’t concur with, or so I thought.

“This isn’t something you can keep to yourself! Jesus knows you’re gay! There’s no hiding from Jesus!” Wait! What? I slowly craned my head around and pretended scratch my chin with my shoulder. The man nodded nervously. He looked obviously trapped. The woman seemed like she was going to launch into a diatribe, and I wasn’t about to miss it. I pretended to look for soap and began picking up bars and sniffing them.

“Jesus can tell if you’re a gay, and he doesn’t like it. Jesus doesn’t tolerate gay people. Remember Sodom and Gomorrah burned because Jesus wanted to punish homosexuals for their sins. Actually, that was the Holy Father, but you know what I’m saying” she corrected herself, not wanting to sound ignorant.

I would like to point out, again, where we were. We were in an organic food co-op not two blocks from where I had witnessed the first legal same-sex marriages performed in the United States two years earlier. Walking though the aisles of the store, I had seen at least two other dykes and a gay boy. The lady was standing in her Sodom’s marketplace, for fuck’s sake! And yet the way she was talking didn’t make me think that she had any awareness of this fact.

I decided that this situation needed to be remedied. The woman needed to know that she was surrounded by gay. But how to accomplish this was a bit of an issue. Since I was by myself, I couldn’t just grope a female friend’s ass suggestively, like I did when some monks stood too close for comfort at a gay marriage rally at the state house (it only made them pray louder, by the way). I’m not gay looking enough for the average straight person to notice that they’re in the company of a homosexual, and I find bedazzling your person with rainbow gear to be kind of tacky. Consequently, I concluded that feigning a call to an imaginary girlfriend was the way to go.

Yet what to say? It’s trickier to convey gayness to someone listening in on a phone conversation than you’d think. I thought that the best approach would be to say something like, “Hey my love, I’ll pick up your dress at the dry cleaners…yeah, I liked the way it made your ass look…I was admiring it all night at Jen and Sally’s party,” in my most suggestive of tones. Perhaps if I wanted to kick the lesbionic effect up a notch I’d pick up a bottle of herbal massage oil and say, “Sweetheart, did you like the Soothing Natures oil when I gave you that backrub last time?” That would do it.

I went to pluck my cell phone out of my bag to make the fake call when the woman, who had been rambling on about the Catholic Church again, said, “God will smite us for our sins in teaching tolerance of gay people! In fact, he has already made his displeasure known. What do you think those tornadoes in North Carolina were? And Hurricane Katrina? That’s God’s voice right there. BAM!” and she clapped! Loudly! For extra effect!

The guy behind me jumped. It was already getting hard for me to keep a straight face, but this pushed me over the edge. I choked back laughter and stumbled toward the cash registers. My evil plan to acquaint the woman with her queer surroundings was derailed. Alas, another missed opportunity. But such is life. I’m sure God, or whoever, will send more fundamentalists my way in the near future. In the meantime, I'll try to think of ways to be more prepared for such occasions.



*I will own up to being a huge freakin’ hippie. I get pissed off when people don’t recycle. I own a vegetarian cookbook by a woman named Crescent Dragonwagon. I use organic detergents. I’m crunchy-granola and proud of it.