It Burns!

Russ over at Barely Legal writes about the experience of having a liberal parent turn conservative on you. His experience doesn't exactly match mine, but it's close enough to sting.

My mother was in all sorts of female empowerment groups in the early 70s. She was an Indian Health Nurse (the only health care on an entire reservation) when she was 22 where she would explain to Indian women in Cree that they didn't have to be just squaws and that they should start practicing birth control and take control of their lives. While this makes for an interesting woman, it also makes for a bizarre mother. When I was 12, I remember calling a woman a "chick" and getting a stern lecture from my mother about the equality of the sexes.

Then my mother stopped working for the government and opened up her own business. Slowly, government bureaucracy and shiftless employees drove her to the brink of madness. That's right, she began listening to conservative talk radio. She claimed to be older and wiser but crazy things would come out of her mouth like, "How would you like to have been adopted by a couple of homosexuals. That should be illegal." Now, instead of getting lectures about women's equality I have to listen to, "You better do right by that girl. A woman has to depend on a man," and "A man's life is empty without the direction a woman provides from the home." The woman who once rode in an elevator with the prime minister of Canada and lectured him about women's rights would now prefer to listening to her idol, Dr. Laura Schlesinger.

http://barelylegalblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/feminism.html

There's more.