people are strange when you’re a stranger…

Today I went to City Hall to attend a hearing on whether or not the city should grant a special license to Planned Parenthood to open their second clinic in the whole local area (about 230,000 people, the size of Orlando, FL, Norfolk, VA, or Baton Rouge, LA).

I almost didn’t go — I really didn’t expect it would be that big of a deal. I certainly didn’t expect to be there for three hours.

In some ways I’m glad I went, but in other ways I’m just depressed now that I’ve seen the way the “concerned citizens” (how I loathe that phrase) around me view the world.

It’s nice to be able to surround yourself with people who generally share the same views as you — I know I have some people on my flist whose views differ from significantly from mine, but by and large I feel like I share a certain amount of common ideology with the people I interact with online.

In the “real world” I live in a very repressed, politically conservative area in many ways. Attending the City Hall meeting and hearing the number of people speaking out against the new clinic, most of whom talked about how God/the Bible says it’s wrong to murder babies (I wish I were exaggerating), made me feel alien and alienated in the place where I live all over again.

At one point a guy probably my age went up to the mic and started talking, and almost before he even opened his mouth I thought, “this guy looks like a d-bag.” Turns out I was right and all he wanted to do was talk about the ABORTION center and how the ABORTION center was providing ABORTIONS and murdering the unborn and omg ABORTIONS and had he mentioned ABORTIONS?

It’s important to note at this point that a) this clinic specifically would not be providing abortions, only the other clinic would continue to do so as it already does, and b) he wasn’t even a local, he was from Seattle and employed by the WA state branch of Focus on the Family.

Yeah, I pretty much wanted to punch his smarmy-looking, overweening face in.

I will even admit that the site chosen could be less contentious — the back of its lot borders the back of an elementary school lot, so quite a few people were freaking the hell out about, I dunno, comprehensive sex education being spread by close contact between real estate. (I see this as a sign that they themselves did not get adequate sex education as children.)

However…despite what I said at the mic — that it’s our responsibility as citizens to raise the level of the dialogue and not to give in to fear by saying “don’t put it here because we’re scared of violence and picketing and omg people will bomb our children” — it really just makes me want to leave for greener pastures where people aren’t so batshit crazy.

But given that I have a house to pay for, I’ll temporarily settle for signing up to volunteer with PP. Suck it, anti-choicers! Congratulations, you’ve motivated me to stop sitting on my ass and start actually taking action against you all!