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05/13/2001 Entry: "Murderin' Baby Rapers 'R' US"

Last Monday, I looked like a "murderin' baby raper."

I was returning some items to Marci at the Berkeley Emergency Food and Housing Project on Monday, when I heard a woman angrily yelling something at a "murderin' baby raper." I looked around and was relieved to see that there was no one else around. I didn't want to be around a murderin' baby raper. Then it dawned on me that I was the murderin' baby raper at whom she was yelling. She proceeded in her litany of all the sexually and physically violative acts I had perpetrated against her body, mind and children. I resisted my desire to engage her and kept gathering the piles of notebooks and papers that I had been using to help raise money for the program that was very likely helping her. Her tirade continued as she moved further away from me and toward a shopping cart that was on the far side of the parking lot.

I left her and her tirade behind, until this morning. As I get ready to go to Eugenio's First Holy Communion at St. Joseph the Worker Church, the thought of this troubled, injured woman comes back to me. I'm not sure if it's echoes of my queer activist past and the invectives of "religious" zealots in the south who would paint me as a child molestor for my sexual orientation. Or is it 'cause I've heard and read so much about Catholic priests and their abuse of young children in their charge. Or is it because of my own view of organized religion as the justifier and rationalizer of many great abuses perpetrated on individuals and people throughout history and the present.

I guess it really is odd that this woman's illness would so distress that her comments still linger for me several days after she made them. I went to Mass today, my first in over 20 years. It wasn't too bad. It helped that the focus of the today was on young people. As I sat there today, I thought of the woman who would have me be her perpetrator. I wondered who had hurt her.