It Was Like One Slap In My Face After Another... Gay Husbands Go To Red America.

[Moostache]

207. Best wishes to you and your spouse...

I can relate to your experience on a far more superficial level...my wife has family roots in North Carolina, fundie-roots...complete with Methodist and Baptist ministers and the whole works...

I am an avowed atheist. I'm not in anyone's face with it. I don't care what they believe, or how many sky daddies they need to sleep well (I lost count at 3 ... they also have some kind of virgin fetish going on, but that's another topic entirely). I don't seek out opportunities to ridicule their beliefs or loudly proclaim what idiots I think many of them are. I do not try to start conversations about it or even disrupt their overly pious and self-serving prayers for "grace". I am content to ignore them about I remain pleasant and cordial and talk abut other things...usually the weather or sports because our politics are not exactly congruent either...

What I DO care about is having them attempt to impart their "wisdom" on my children. They HATE this, and by extension it has made me persona non grata at family events and holidays. If one of my children asks me a question that normally would illicit a "god did it" response from one of them, I simply give them an age-appropriate, fact-based answer. These things really gall them, but I will not back down to keep the peace....the peace is 'you stay in YOUR kid's lives, and I stay in mine, period, full stop.'

I get a lot of eye rolls and hushed voices when I enter the room...sometimes its fun to be the conversation stopper ... I have started savoring their guilty looks and oh-so polite excuses to go to another room. While I am not asked to step out of the family pictures, I was also once asked to take the group photos of "just the family".

My wife and I are raising our children completely free of any religious child abuse. We do not threaten them with hellfire to induce behavior. We do not teach them ANYTHING from that excremental book of Leviticus or the Old Testament. We teach them many of the values of Jesus Christ's message - the universal messages of peace and love and caring for your fellow man...but none of the hocus-pocus, man-as-god, risen-from-the-dead, trans-substantial-sacrifice to appease a bloodthirsty tyrant.

This makes me about a popular as a fornicator or homosexual in their eyes and worse yet I am damning their relatives to all eternity...one of them actually asked me that a few years ago - "how can you do this to your children, don't you know they will go to hell forever?" I looked them dead in the eyes and replied, "good, then they'll be with me and we'll all be free of your nonsense forever." Have not heard that particular person's voice directed at me ever again...

Congratulations on keeping your cool and keeping the feelings of your spouse central in your mind - you have a good heart and clear priorities and that alone is enough to me. Hopefully the pain for your spouse will ease as your relationship continues to develop, but take heart that some people's minds won't change - usually the people who would never change are not the ones we would want around much anyway - and the best we can do in this life is find someone to love and share it with...beyond that, its all gravy.