Things That Make Me Salty But I'm Not Sure How to Write About

A list - issues of varying importance, about which I am varying levels of salty...

It’s been a minute since I’ve written a regular newsletter, and my brain is full of thoughts. I thought I would just get some of them out - longer pieces about some of these will follow I’m sure.

1. The Cracker Barrel logo change.

Or rather… I’m salty about the COMPLAINTS about the change. It is bad, okay? It is personality-less in the way that much of contemporary life feels personality-less. But is it WOKE? ARE conservatives REALLY as mad as I am being led to believe? Why do people care about corporations and logos? They aren’t ACTUALLY our friends - they aren’t even PEOPLE. They are businesses, and as such, are always going to be more concerned about the bottom line that about things like DEI or your (or my!) feelings. What are we doing here??????

2. Sidney Sweeney and American Eagle

Related to #1 - one of the reasons I’m genuinely wondering if conservatives are ACTUALLY upset about the Cracker Barrel logo is that not a single liberal I read/watch/listen to/follow/know ACTUALLY cared about the Sidney Sweeney American Eagle ad. I only saw conservatives TALKING ABOUT how upset we were. So I’ve wondered if the same thing is happening with Cracker Barrel. I do not care about Sidney Sweeney. I do not care about American Eagle. I think the ad was in bad taste, and Sidney Sweeney is apparently a Republican (I genuinely don’t care), but the endless takes about it are the best marketing American Eagle could ever have hoped for. I haven’t thought about American Eagle since high school, when I was upset they didn’t carry clothes in my size. So… congrats to American Eagle for appearing somewhat relevant again, to a certain segment of the population, I guess?

3. Why does Reese have SO MANY book club books?

Celebrity book clubs in general are OUT OF HAND. But Reese… come one. This HAS to be at a rate of more than one a month, right??? They’re everywhere… and I’ve so strongly disliked the ones I’ve read that I have not read a book I was really excited about, by an author I love, BECAUSE Reese made it one of her picks. It’s just a mental barrier I can’t get past! I don’t have anything against Reese Witherspoon - Legally Blonde is a national treasure - but come on. This is too much. Let me read in peace without an unsolicited celebrity opinion.

4. Orthodox folks not realizing that the religious right is not your friend.

I’m going to take your hand now and tell you this as gently as I can… if you are an Orthodox Christian, the American Religious Right is not your friend. You may appear to have common goals around social issues, but I promise you - you do not have as much in common as you think you do.

I was raised Protestant evangelical. I went to a Southern Baptist private school. I went to Ken Hamm creationist conferences before the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter were a twinkle in the Kentucky tax-payer’s eye. These far right evangelicals who have melded politics and religion DO NOT BELIEVE that you are a real Christian. They ARE NOT including prayers to the Theotokos or a troparion for a saint’s feast day in their vision of a “Christian nation”.

And if you’re an Orthodox Christian who is Arab, or Greek, or Slavic - the white Christian Nationalists won’t consider you white, either. None of what you think you have in common will save you in the theocracy these folks imagine.

5. You can’t understand America’s attachment to Israel without understanding evangelicals’ attachment to Israel.

While I don’t think history bears out the claim that America was founded as a “Christian nation”, it also can’t be denied that Protestantism has had an INSANE influence on our country. And nowhere is this clearer than in our relationship to Israel.

The Puritans, two Great Awakenings, and a population generally fixated on the potential of the individual have led to a country with some grand ideas about itself. The Puritans loved to compare themselves to the Israelites, and talk about themselves as a “city on a hill” - an example of God’s witness in the world. American evangelicalism loves to both appropriate and disregard Judaism in equal measure, and nowhere is this more evident than in evangelicalism’s insistence on conflating the ancient nation of Israel with the modern nation-state, carved out of an inhabited land, in 1948.

To a certain breed of evangelical, Israel is both the key to the Second Coming of Christ, and the spiritual ancestor of the United States. Trying to understand our inability to recognize Israel’s atrocities without reckoning with evangelicalism’s beliefs about the Bible as the literal and

infallible word of God and Israel as the literal Old Testament nation is fruitless.

6. Working to exclude trans-girls and women from women-only spaces is mean and bad for women.

I’m going to start this off with a little story.

On what can safely be called the worst day of our married life, my husband and I dragged ourselves out of the house for some food and fresh air. I pulled a baseball cap on over my short hair, a pair of bermuda shorts, a sports bra and a baggy t-shirt, borrowed from my husband. We were walking around in a bit of a daze in an outdoor shopping center, looking at the menu for a pizza place we had never been to.

“Would you gentlemen like to come in and have a seat?” the hostess asked us.

We looked at each other. “No thanks,” my husband said, and we walked away and had our only laugh of the day.

Luckily, I was not trying to use a women’s restroom in the vicinity of Kristi Noem or Nancy Mace - who knows what kind of harassment I could have faced, all for failing to dress my feminine best when I left my house on that awful day.

Even if you are on the fence, or weirded out about trans issues… don’t let those who make political careers and fortunes off of your fear and discomfort tell you what a woman is or isn’t. For the amount of air time that trans athletes are taking up, you would think Caitlyn Jenner herself was trying to dismantle the NCAA. In reality, trans people make up less than 1% of the entire population. They don’t have the NUMBERS to meaningful affect your life or mine. So why are we being mean to them?

None of this is about women - not our well-being, not our safety, not our opportunities. This about fear and control. The people telling you to care about this aren’t funneling time, money or energy into funding women’s sports, or shelters for domestic violence victims, or closing the wage gap, or providing affordable childcare. They’re policing women, deciding who is and isn’t the “right kind” of woman, and I promise you - this will not lead to greater freedom for ANY of us.

7. Stop telling me when fall starts.

Life is hard. If I want to put out decorative gourds and drink an apple cider on September 1st, LET ME BE. I don’t CARE if the official start of fall is actually September 21st. Let the basic bitches have their PSL and superfluous scarves. Let the goths decorate early for Halloween. WHO CARES WHEN Mariah Carey starts defrosting. LIFE IS HARD. SUMMER ACTUALLY SUCKS FOR MOST OF US.

LET PEOPLE ENJOY THINGS.