"I think I remember Hamlet accurately."
"Well, I remember Mel Gibson accurately, and he didn't say that. That Polonius guy did."
About a week or so ago I was out with some friends celebrating the Queen's birthday. (Queen of Spades, not the Queen of England. Google tells me her birthday is coming up this week, however, if any of you wanted to send felicitations.) A friend and I ended up talking with two guys who had been sitting next to her at the bar. It was fairly uneventful chitchat until the end of the evening, when one of those two gentlemen asked me to talk politics with him. Specifically, he asked what I thought about "the fact that our whole government is going to shut down because of abortion".
OK. So.
I'm not really sure why I went forth with the conversation. Honestly, I don't usually like to argue with people I don't even know, and besides which, "belligerent humorless feminist"* isn't typically considered attractive, you know? (*I don't actually think I'm either belligerent or humorless, but I know how this stuff is often perceived. Anyhoo.) So I politely said that the potential government shutdown wasn't really about abortion, but that the issue of abortion was being used to make the debate more heated, and that what was really at the heart of the issue was access to preventive care and contraception.
This led to Guy #1 saying a variety of interesting (read: totally off-base if you ask me) things, such as:
1. "I don't want my tax money paying for abortions!"
2. (when told that it doesn't, actually) "What, you actually think Planned Parenthood follows the law and doesn't use federal money for abortions?"
3. "Well, we don't subsidize smoking, why are we subsidizing birth control? We should tax condoms like we do cigarettes!"
4. "Poor people just choose not to be educated. I mean, the internet is free and everyone has access to it, so they have no excuse."
5. "You might end up getting pregnant when you're not planning on it for a variety of reasons. Maybe your marriage isn't so great so you weren't planning on having kids, maybe it's because you got raped. Either way it's about choice."
Yeah.
So there was about fifteen minutes of him saying things, and me disagreeing with him and offering some information/opinions, and the whole time I'm thinking, "This guy is kind of out there" and "Well, his friend who was seeming sort of interested in me is probably about to run for the hills. Oh well." But I couldn't justify hearing someone saying "a bad marriage = rape, basically" and other such things and just letting it slide and giggling and saying, "Oh, I don't know!" Because yeah, not really me. I mean, to be fair, it would have been me even as recently as a year ago. But these days, I'm not so much interested in pretending to be neutral about stuff for the sake of looking dateable. My true nature will emerge eventually, why engage in false advertising?
Imagine my surprise when Guy #1 and I wrapped up our conversation and I prepared to leave, and Guy #2 asked me if I'd like to have dinner sometime. I'm probably making much more of this than it deserves, but as someone who has been told that my opinionated nature is a liability in dating on more than one occasion, that was...nice. You know?
So we did just that, went out for dinner, and had ourselves a nice time. So we'll see...
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