Yeah, I dunno why this is the DoD’s job to hash out, I’m with you there. That part is the Christian Nationalism nasty bullying around.

I get you need chaplains, but IMO just use the official endonyms of each group without trying to categorize or subcategorize, and call it a day and let the chaplains match themselves up.

If I were a Catholic in the military and I got an LDS chaplain (or vice versa) for my religious rites, I’d be upset. So just treat all the little groups as their own little things if you must change something.

Mormons are absolutely not Nicene Christians, but they profess to follow Jesus of Nazareth,

Is a bit like

Naturopaths are absolutely not germ-theory doctors, but they profess to practice wellness and healing,

as a way to shoehorn Brenda with the essential oils into the category of “doctor”. At the point where you’ve denied one of the few definitional traits of the category, you have to admit you don’t fit into it anymore, you can’t just pretend the definition doesn’t actually exist. It’s like being a lawyer who doesn’t deal with legal matters, but they have a bunch of ideas their college roommate came up with about how to run a country while he was high before dropping out of the first semester of law school.

Thanks. It wasn’t the worst thing she did, but it was particularly crystallizing.

I’ve done a lot of work on healing from it since. I’ve got a kid now, and it’s been healing to live every day in a way that shows that you totally can just love your kid and not have to treat them like that.

No.

I might, if what they did were severe enough, express that what they did is disappointing. But that’s different from branding them with the iron of disappointment-as-identity. Everyone does stuff sometimes that is worse than they aspire to be. The trick is coming back from it, learning and growing and changing.

I remember how it felt the day I asked my mom, after she had screamed at me and hit me a bunch for stuff she made up about me, “what did I ever do to you to make you hate me this much?”, and she screamed back “YOU WERE BORN!” And I believed she meant it, because none of this was out of character.

I was 12.

No kid should ever feel the hopelessness and abandonment I felt in that moment.