Long Live The Graduate

When I was an infant, and well on into my toddler years, my mother would dress me in girls’ clothes. She wanted a girl, and I had a penis, but my mom is one lady who knows how to solve a problem. You would never know it, but I am a vision in Osh-Kosh-B-Gosh’s 1988 line of women’s wear. Soon, her temporary fix would be discovered. On an afternoon that my dad returned home early from work, my cross-dressing days abruptly concluded, and with it, the only gender identity crisis I have ever endured.

For all of her problem solving savvy, she never did figure out how to remedy the problem that would soon become me (how I like to put it anyway). No amount of compulsory cross-dressing could have. There are a number of theories that aim to identify possible reasons that creatures like me begin to exist. These include being the middle child, not getting enough attention, simply being evil, and being too smart for my unchallenging environment. I prefer this last one. And there may be some validity to that position also, particularly while I was under the tutelage of particular educational institutions.

Up until I graduated from high school (This too is fiercely debated to this day. More on that later.), I attended private Christian schools for the overwhelming majority of my education. Some might say that, in areas of emphasizing the importance of a worldview, stunting sexual experimentation, and harboring delinquents, these Christian institutions excelled. Conversely, others might conjecture that, in terms of teaching a balanced and fair dose of available perspectives, these Christian institutions failed–in essence, they forfeited because they plainly refused to teach anything other than the infallible Word of God. The trick there was that–and this is the trick on which many of the debates between secularism and Christianity are hinged–the infallible Word of God was taught according to Mr. McRevice (first name: Phillip).

Being that God was not around to narrate His own words, the Bible could only have been narrated by men. Men, as we know, are fallible (although, less so than women), or their words are anyway. Therefore, purporting that any teaching of the Word of God was infallible was simply a fraud; and arguably, it was a fraud also by the legal definition, as their deception was intended to obtain money from students and their families in the form of tuition. How this has continued to occur to this day, unchallenged in a court of law, is a mystery to me. If you’re reading this Mr. Darrow, we should talk. Email me.

So school was not all that challenging for me. This is not to say that I was of above-average intelligence. This is to say that Christian schools were of below-average effectiveness. In other words, if the primary goal was for them to convince me of anything, they seldom succeeded. Although at times they were right and I was wrong, I sensed that their goal was to mold me into the person they wanted me to be, to wear the uniform without asking questions, and my innate stubbornness simply resisted. Questions were the key. In true Socratic spirit, questions were often my weapon of choice in the battles, ones waged over such classroom topics as the moral permissibility of dancing. “Wait, what do you mean we can’t dance?” Okay, they may have prevailed in that struggle–because to this day, I cannot dance, having never learned for fear of eternal damnation–but the war was far from finished.

Unlike most wars, I knew the exact date of its conclusion years in advance: graduation day. My strategy was to simply attack, evade, and repeat. And I did so relentlessly. In fact, in the same way that many people claim that some traumatic and life-changing event caused them to convert to Christianity–such as Saul in the Bible when he fell off a donkey and became Paul–I think that throughout the course of my struggle, I caused the opposite to be proven too.

My arch nemesis, who was my high school Bible teacher, basketball coach, athletic director, and an overall model of piety, first crossed blades with me in Bible class over the issue of whether or not it would be a sin for a Christian missionary to proselytize a nudist colony and while there to, as the Bible says, “do as the Romans do.” I contended that Christian missionaries to a nudist colony would be Biblically compelled to be naked for God. He strongly disagreed and further asserted the fervency with which he held his opinion when he essentially disciplined me for disagreeing with him. He exacted his revenge by kicking me off of the basketball team, my beloved sport and means of coping with the rigors of indoctrination. This traumatic event changed me. I would never again return to the God squad.

I think he was mad because he secretly loved the loophole I had offered him whereby he could pursue his interests of the flesh, and still retain his Christian reputation and his Christian paycheck. This theory turned out to be true. A few years later, I was informed that he had gotten the boot as well. He had taken my proposal, modified it for his own purposes, and extramaritally fornicated with the school’s Christian P.E. teacher. In the end, he lost both his Christian reputation and his Christian paycheck (and reportedly his wife). I am certainly not glad that tragedy has befallen this man and, incidentally, his family too. I am only glad that he illustrated an essential point so well.

The Christian school environment, to me at least, wreaked of adulterated ideas, ones that may have once been great, ones that may have once been worth fighting and even dying for. Within the whitewashed walls of my Christian school, those once great ideas were just words from the mouths of men. And for my Bible teacher, those ideas which he spouted religiously were not meaningful enough to him to remain faithful to his wife and family. It is an unfortunate story that finally shifted the momentum in the favor of the naysayers.

I had all but won, all but graduated that is. Graduation would be my victory and my liberation. And then I graduated. “Yes!” And then I un-graduated. “Wait, what?” Well, that is basically what the letter said that the school mailed me several months after they mailed me my diploma. Not wanting to concede defeat, they feebly attempted to negate my high school graduation. Because during high school I had chosen to take an accelerated course load, I graduated early. I actually was in a position to graduate at the conclusion of my junior year. But I wanted to give basketball another shot. I wanted to try again my senior year. So I returned to school and had to enroll in freshman-level courses as there was nothing left for me to take.

The short story is that my old Bible teacher and basketball coach was still there, and he thwarted my efforts to play again. So upon learning that I would not be permitted to play, I threw in the towel and graduated. I had completed far more course work than the school required so they issued me a diploma. And they mailed it to me.

Then, as I previously mentioned, they sought to rescind that diploma on grounds of . . . get ready . . . an obscure rule that said that for every year a student attended the school, they would be required to take a full year of Bible. But the intention of that rule is to state that students must remain enrolled in Bible for the entire time they are in school, not to retroactively cheat graduates of their diplomas simply because they disagreed with your faith. The summary of their position was that although I had completed 4 full years of Bible, the fifth credit of Bible, the one from my miniature senior year, was not a full credit. Therefore, I was in violation of that rule. My position of course was that I had completed all state, county, and school requirements for high school graduation. I had graduated and received a diploma as proof of their acknowledgment of my graduation.

For further proof, consider this. I am in the senior yearbook. I even won a senior superlative: best sense of humor. There is a page in the yearbook denoting this. My graduation and senior superlative was commemorated by a plaque that hangs on one of the school’s hallway walls. Luckily for me, God invented the paper trail long before my Christian school discovered sin (a blanket term that includes many things: fraud, adultery, etc.). So, both in reality and now, on a technicality on account of my paper trail, a yearbook, and a plaque, I can claim victory by graduation. The war is over. Long live the graduate.