Just Another Story. More About My Mother. #11

Page 38.
     My mother was rather politically active. She was a big time "letter to the editor' writer. This started in the early mid-1960's, I think.
     She was a Democrat from the time she started voting until she turned Republican in '68 to vote for Nixon. So she was a Democrat for 30 years or so and a Republican for her final handful of presidential cycles. She was usually liberal with her policies toward race, religion and creed but quite conservative on social issues like abortion, entertainment censorship and sex. She was on TV twice, I think, for being vocal with her support of the Viet Nam war and opposition to abortion. Then, she was also featured in a few newspaper articles about concerned citizens who were in favor of book banning and, again, opposition to abortion. 10 years after her death, her name was still being brought up in letters to the editor which mentioned former Cleveland-area abortion foes.
     There were certain inconsistencies with Jane's politics, as there are with everybody's. As my brothers and sisters grew up and moved out of the house, my parents rented out spare bedrooms to students at the local universities. We rented to many international students, including a great variety of Arabs; this, in spite of my parent's profound Zionist activities. However, they wouldn't rent to Blacks, even though they had deep friendships with Black people and supported the Black cause more than the average for their generation. Also, one day when I was a mid-teen, she told me why she was so opposed to abortion. But then she told me that I should talk with people who felt differently and make up my own mind. And, when I was in the 7th grade, she read one of my assigned English readings and proceeded to complain extremely loudly in the newspaper about "the books Johnny reads in school". But she never told me that I couldn't read it.
     To have a political discussion with her about anything was to engage in a screaming match if you disagreed with her. Those who didn't know better, learned the hard way.
     She worked on the re-elect Nixon committee in '72 and Watergate upset her deeply. When he resigned, she said that "the Libs won." She was equally upset with Ford for pardoning Nixon because she thought the pardon implied Nixon's guilt and she wanted the scandal to go to trial so his innocence could be proved. She thought the entire scandal was fabricated by Nixon's Liberal enemies.
     Jane began quieting down a great deal by the mid-late '70's because she thought the new "Moral Majority" were anti-Semites. She knew that she agreed with much of their politics, but was very hesitant to align with Born-Again Christians. She equated them, practically, with Nazis.