livebloggingmydescentintomadness:

You are not a horrible person at all!! He’s your dad and you love him, that’s completely natural and normal. When people say those things, they mean your Nazi uncle, not your dad who’s conservative but not a monster. Nobody should ever expect you to cut your father out of your life because he’s not as far left as you’d like.

My mom and I live together, we’re extremely close, and she was a Republican her entire life until Trump came onto the scene and she had her eyes opened to the massive hypocrisy and evil of the GOP, and just how she’d been lied to for decades. She believed all kinds of things that weren’t true, she had a lot of ingrained bigotry, but she’s honestly one of the nicest, gentlest people you’ll ever meet. She had been taught that abortion is murder and being gay is a choice and a sin, but she’s never been hateful, she only thought she was doing the right thing.

I used to be a Republican too, because I’m a white Christian Texan who was taught the same wrong things my mom was, and it wasn’t until I came on tumblr that I even began to realize how much of what I thought I knew was wrong. We really can’t under-emphasize just how widespread and how effective right-wing misinformation and propaganda has been, because I can’t even begin to tell you how many things I’d been taught were just straight-up lies. 

It took me time to unlearn all of that and truly grasp how much I didn’t know, how much I had to come to terms with. Realizing that your entire worldview is completely backwards is more of a mindfuck than I can possibly tell you, so it’s not an easy process. It took months and years of reading and listening and learning for me to reach minimum acceptable tumblr wokeness, because I was starting from scratch. It also took years of conversations with my mom for her to not just hate Trump, but to realize many of her views were wrong or misguided, and freely declare herself a Democrat and a socialist. 

Neither of us were ever hateful people, just deeply ignorant and lied to, and that’s the important difference. If you have a relative who can look at Trump locking up brown children in cages and not care in the least, that’s an asshole you should drop from your life. But if they can see that such heinous acts are wrong, they’re just conflicted and confused from a lifetime of thinking the way they’ve been taught to think, they’re just ignorant and haven’t learned better yet – that’s a decent person. 

It’s especially okay for you to maintain a good relationship with your dad if you’re able to talk to him about these subjects and help him out of his ignorance. Cutting people out of your life is for those who are 100% unteachable and refuse to even consider that they might be wrong. You can’t help somebody who isn’t willing to listen. If your dad is willing to listen, then you should keep talking. You don’t have to fight or try to force him left, just talk.

You absolutely do not need to feel guilty for loving your conservative-leaning family members and wanting a good relationship with them. Ultimately, their beliefs aren’t your responsibility, and it’s only natural to want to be close to your parents if you can be. There’s nothing wrong with that, hon, don’t feel bad.