Years ago, when I was a columnist for the long-gone and much-missed Indianapolis News, a reader called me to complain about a piece I’d written.
This was nearly 30 years ago. The national debate about same-sex civil unions had started to heat up. I’d done a column saying that I didn’t see why having two consenting adults entering into an agreement to love, honor and support each other should be a problem for anyone.
The caller disagreed. She was an older woman.
She said she couldn’t believe anyone who wasn’t gay would think same-sex unions were OK. She asked me if I was married.
I told her I wasn’t, even though I’d just become engaged to the woman who now has been my wife for 27 years and is the mother of our two children.
The woman on the phone said I must be gay if I was as old as I was—I was in my 30s then—and hadn’t been married.
I refused to contradict her, because I thought denying her charge was tantamount to saying being gay was something embarrassing. I didn’t and don’t believe that.
She hammered away on that theme until, at last, I interrupted her.
I told her that I’d figured out why she’d called. She must want to sleep with me, I said.
No, she sputtered, she’d been married to her husband for more than 30 years.
Well, I said, if she didn’t want to sleep with me, I was having a heck of a time figuring out why my sexual orientation was any of her business. Or anyone else’s, for that matter.
With that, she slammed the phone down.
I thought about that long-ago conversation when I read a truly idiotic essay in Newsweek by someone named John Mac Ghlionn about pop megastar Taylor Swift.
Ghlionn said Swift, who donates millions of dollars to worthy causes and provides good livings for many employees, is a poor role model for young women.
His reasoning?
She’s 34, unmarried and doesn’t have children.
Just how he decided Swift’s personal life and family-planning decisions were any of his or anyone else’s business, Ghlionn doesn’t say. He just assumes that he has the right to make her life choices for her.
I don’t know much about Ghlionn. A search reveals that he presents himself as a researcher in psychosocial issues—without offering any credentials to support his contention—and that he mostly writes for websites in the outer reaches of the right-wing cyber swamp.
Nor do I have any certain knowledge as to why he decided to attack Swift in such personal terms.
I suspect, though, that he thought he might be able to surf the wave of Swift’s immense popularity far enough to move from the outer reaches of the cyber swamp into the mainstream. A follow-up piece he wrote that alternates between self-pity and self-congratulations suggests as much.
Ghlionn doesn’t say in his piece whether he’s married or not. Nor does he say, if he is, whether he let someone else—anyone else—make that decision for him.
The same goes for having children.
The fact that there’s remarkably little information available about him suggests that he guards his private life pretty zealously.
That’s OK.
That’s his right—and we should respect it even if he, like the woman who called me all those years ago, isn’t willing to respect the boundaries of others’ private lives.
Two wrongs….
As that long-ago caller noted, like Taylor Swift, I was single well into my 30s.
In fact, I didn’t get married until I was almost 38. I didn’t become a father until I was nearly 40.
That’s because it took me that long to find the right life partner.
My daughter and my son are both young adults now.
My wife and I won’t put any pressure on our children to marry and have kids of their own. We know it is more important to get those decisions right than it is to make them fast.
It’s not likely that Taylor Swift ever would ask me for life advice.
If she did, though, I’d tell her not to let moronic criticism like Ghlionn’s bother her.
Her life is her own, not his or mine or anyone else’s.
Just like any other woman, she can and should be allowed and trusted to live it on her own terms.
