Neighbors of YHB have a car with a pro-life bumper-sticker. I don’t know them, but I see the car every day. It’s disconcerting, as I have some standard liberal prejudices concerning people with pro-life bumper-stickers: intolerant, small-minded, obsessive, judgmental. I’ve no idea if this particular couple are or not, and every day I seem to tell myself not to judge this couple in advance of perhaps someday meeting them, and every day I wind up thinking about the issue (which is, with one thing and another, an unpleasant one to think about, whether I’m ruminating on the social, the political, or the ethical aspects) and getting slightly disgruntled, and resenting them for it. Irrational, irrational.\n
Anyway, that’s background to sometime last week noticing the rear window of their car, which has the standard college decal with the name of the local college, as do many of the local cars of course, and underneath it in similar lettering and a similar style, recognizable as a ‘college decal’ the single word CHRISTENDOM<\/b>. And I starting thinking ‘hey, is that some sort of scary religious-right recognition thing, saying we should be governed by a particular interpretation of Christian Scripture? Is this a disguised political statement? Are they in fact telling me and mine to get the heck out?’ And I get all cross about it.\n