Goodbye, Target.

Well, I bit the bullet. I canceled my Target card.

I had been waffling over this decision for days. I am angry enough at Target -- for putting empty political sentiment over public safety -- that I knew I wouldn't shop there. The issue wasn't whether Target was going to get any more of my money; they weren't. So the question of the card itself remained: would Target reverse itself, thereby making it a hassle to reestablish the card? Would it hurt my credit to close it, especially if I turned around and opened it again? If I stopped spending money at Target but kept the card open, would Target even notice?

But the more I thought about it, the angrier I got at Target: for making this decision in the first place; for making me feel like a crazy person because no one else seems to see that for the vast majority of the boycotters, this isn't about bigotry but about safety, and the refusal to participate in a political agenda that is empirically bananas; for making me devote so much mental real estate to this.

I came to the conclusion that Target made their very public stand, and there's no way they will have the intestinal fortitude to reverse themselves. The LGBTQ+-whatever lobby is too loud and vindictive, and Target has a long history of pandering to it. Unless scores of little girls are sexually assaulted inside Target store bathrooms, they will stand by their bad move, even in the face of falling share value and millions of lost customers.

So I was 75% of the way to the decision to close it when something else occurred to me: elsewhere in the world, even today, Christians martyrs are being beheaded for their refusal to back down from their faith. And here I am, worrying about the inconvenience of closing this credit card.

Decision made.

While I was making dinner for my family last night, I called customer service and got a supervisor on the phone. I told her I wanted to close my account. This conversation (more or less verbatim), ensued:

CSR: I see you've been a cardholder for over three years. Can I ask you why you're closing your account now?
Me: I think your bathroom policy stinks. [SO ELOQUENT, Colleen. 🙄]
CSR: Okay. Just a second while I make a note of your concerns.

She sounded like a) she'd been hearing that a lot recently -- although possibly most people put it better? -- and b) she'd secretly like to agree.

So it's done. I am no longer a Target customer.

Goodbye, Dollar Spot. I think I'll miss you the most.

You guys, what are we going to do?

I live in Virginia, where it is now been determined by a federal court that rules requiring schoolchildren to use the bathroom that corresponds to their biological sex are discriminatory. This is bound to go nationwide, and fast.

Also this week, Target has released a statement that customers can now use whichever bathroom they please, as well. Because, as the statement says, "Everyone deserves to feel like they belong."

... Except for me, Target, and the millions of people like me. We get to feel uncomfortable in the bathroom because there's a dude in there. And he doesn't have to look like a lady, he just has to tell security, should anyone have the cojones to alert security, that he feels like a lady. Because as we also know, no pervert would ever take advantage of the culture of fear surrounding this issue and follow a little girl into a public restroom. Perverts have the utmost respect for the transgendered and would never appropriate their gender dysphoria for their own nefarious purposes. That's a thing that we know... Right?

I do whatever is humanly possible to avoid public restrooms already, but this is enough to make me hibernate in my own home. I don't even have a high school-aged girl (yet), but the idea that high school-aged boys would be able to use her bathroom and locker room is horrifying to me. If my plan weren't already to home-school, it would have to be now.

I have quite a bit of sympathy for the mentally ill -- and make no mistake, the "transgendered" are absolutely mentally ill -- but this is not the way to help them. When schools provide single-occupant restrooms for the use of the mentally ill, gender non-conforming student, the student inevitably throws around words like "stigmatizing" and "otherizing." (Never mind that if I had been offered a single-occupancy restroom option in high school, I'd have been thrilled.) The most helpful thing we can do for these people is to tell them that they are not above the rules that everyone has lived by since the dawn of public restrooms.

Strike that: the most helpful thing we could do is to get these people some real psychological care. A refusal to treat mental illness as something to be celebrated is a close second.

We are enabling a vanishingly small and deeply confused super-minority to dictate the safety of every little girl in this country. And I'm not sorry about my feeling that I would rather see every single transgendered individual in this country get his feelings hurt than see even one little girl get raped by a pervert who takes advantage of this madness and follows her into a restroom in full view of people who would stop him but are scared to be called a bigot.

#NeverTrump #NeverHillary #NeverGettingOutOfThisOne

I never want to live through a presidential primary like this one ever again.

I've written before about Trump and the horror he instills in me. I think he's a moral black hole and one of the worst things ever to come out of American politics. I will never, ever vote for him. And that makes me different than many other conservatives (and Catholics) who, while opposed to Trump, will still vote for the man over Hillary.

I. Just. Can't.

Three peas in a pod, and Melania.

Let's start with some comparisons:

• Hillary Clinton is a brazen, habitual liar. Donald Trump is also a brazen, habitual liar. {Do I need to post links for these things? 'Cause I could, but I don't really think these assertions are in question.}

• Hillary Clinton surrounds herself with thugs and bullies. Donald Trump also surrounds himself with thugs and bullies.

• Hillary Clinton is a rabid pro-abortion advocate. Trump claims to be pro-life, awfully recently and with nothing but lip service; but he still praises Planned Parenthood, says he'd appoint his radically pro-abortion sister to the Supreme Court, and did irreparable damage to the pro-life image just last week by advocating for the punishment of women who have abortions (he's since equally-ineptly walked it back, but I'm pretty sure we've all gotten a peek behind the curtain and seen that, once again, the Trump has no well-thought-out positions).

So we've covered the areas where I think they're essentially the same. When it comes down to morality, they're both... Simply without any. That is a horrible turn of events for this nation. The idea that we can't put up a candidate with a stronger moral compass than Hillary Clinton (and when we started with the strongest Republican field in my lifetime) is enough to make me want to sit in the corner and cry indefinitely, but that's where we seem to be.

But what about things like international relations?

I was less-than-impressed with Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State. She laundered bribes from unfriendly countries through the Clinton Foundation, she abandoned our people in Benghazi when they were under attack and then lied to the families about what happened and why. She set up a sketchy home-brew email server in her bathroom which was vulnerable to hacking and ought to have been federally indicted long ago. She was basically a disaster.

Here's the thing, though: I'm still pretty sure that Donald Trump, Most Powerful Man in the World, has the potential to be significantly worse.

Leave aside for the moment that he insisted from the debate stage that we intended to order the military to commit war crimes by targeting the innocent family members of terrorists. Leave aside his thinnest-ever skin. He's also dangerously susceptible to flattery, as proven by his little mutual-admiration society with Vladimir Putin. He says whatever flits through his head, with a special emphasis on being insulting and gauche. Diplomacy is not likely to be his strong suit, by which I mean: I give his hypothetical presidency three months before we're teetering on the brink of WWIII.

"Nuclear armageddon" is worse than "disaster."

He continually claims that he'll make up for the areas where he is weak -- insofar as he admits that he's less than outstanding at anything -- by "hiring the best people." Have we seen any evidence that he knows what "the best people" look like? His campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, has been recently arrested for assault on a reporter. His campaign in Colorado was so disorganized that they failed to win a single delegate and are reduced -- "reduced" -- to trying to make hay out of voter suppression, when in fact there was none.

Let's stop trying to place the blame for Trump's ascension on the "establishment," or on the media, or anywhere else it doesn't belong. Trump voters are grown adults with agency, and moral culpability. Voting for a deeply flawed candidate (which is the kindest description I can muster) as a stand-in for waving a middle finger in the face of the GOP, writ large, is childish, morally bankrupt and dangerous.

There's nothing I can do about this but pray. If your state has already voted, there's nothing you can do about this but pray. If your state hasn't yet voted, please don't sit home and hope someone else will get us out of this. I'm not sure if a vote for Trump is a vote for Hillary (although I strongly suspect as much), but either way it is a vote for depravity.

He Is Risen!

Happy Easter!

Miracle of miracles, I actually managed to get a picture of my family on Easter Sunday for possibly the first time ever.

And, mostly by accident, we were coordinated in our dress.

(I'm not happy about my hair -- I was putting on Keira's shoes for picture-taking and she grabbed the top of my head for balance and I thought I fixed it -- or my makeup. Because we can't have everything.)

Also, I'm just not sure when Keira got so darn tall. Her legs are so long all of a sudden! I guess I knew that, as I've been buying her size 5 pants, she's a bit leggier than your typical three-year-old, but it took me by surprise on Easter.

I hope you had a beautiful day, too.

{I'm reprieving you on the post about Trump vs. Hillary and why I'm despondent until Eastertide is over.}

Hey, guess what!

Less than a month ago, I wrote about how night training Keira was going badly.

Kids love to make a liar out of you, huh?

Since that day, girlfriend night trained herself. I made 0% effort. I was perfectly happy to wait a while before we took the diapers away overnight, but then she woke up every morning for over a week with a perfectly dry diaper on. And she had no accidents while napping. It took us two nights to talk her into giving up her diaper overnight (maybe I was a little too vocally pessimistic about this? ...oops), but she's been totally, 100%, completely-and-utterly diaper free for a week now.

I am so proud of my big girl.

On the Morality of Debt

This isn't a post on whether it's moral to have debt. I commend people who are able to Dave Ramsey their lives, but I think most people have debt, and it's not always harmful. Buuuuuut I just saw something that made me feel a little bit ill: a write-up of a video by a former hedge fund manager, advocating that people ought to just not pay their credit card debt. The reasoning is that your credit score is easy to fix, and anyway credit card companies expect that some people will default, and his own experience having a low credit rating wasn't catastrophic.

There are so many problems with this, I'm not sure where to start.

Oh! I know, let's start with the title of this post: morality.

{via}

Deciding to default on your credit card debt is stealing.

We are commanded by God -- maybe you've heard of Him? -- not to steal. But running up debt, and then choosing to walk away from it is not strategic, it's immoral. Every time you make a purchase on a credit card and sign that slip, you're promising to pay the credit card company for that purchase.

{Before I go on, let me just include a disclaimer: I understand that catastrophes happen, and good people sometimes have no choice but to default on debt that they had every intention of repaying. I am not addressing people in dire straits.}

The same goes for your mortgage, student debt and car loan. If you signed on a dotted line saying that in return for a sum of money upfront, you would make payments with interest, you have a moral obligation to make those payments.

My husband and I have been making payments for over four years on the mortgage for a condo we sold in early 2012. The mortgage crisis of 2008 hit us hard. HARD. We could have defaulted on the mortgage and gotten on with the business of rebuilding our credit, but instead we scraped together the funds from our savings, healthy at the time, and from our retirement accounts to buy it out. It's meant that we haven't been able to build our savings back up, basically at all, for the last four years; we've been paying the equivalent of the mortgage on the condo I owned when we married, just in loan-repayment, on top of our other bills. It has kept us from buying a home of our own, and we have instead been paying the outlandish rents in Northern Virginia. But we strongly felt we had a moral obligation to pay the loan if we could -- and by the grace of God, we could -- and that was the right thing to do. I've hated it, but I would do it again.

I'm not trying to hold us up as paragons of fiscal virtue, but I feel strongly enough about this to have moved four times in seven years from rental to rental, including leaving each home I brought my babies home from the hospital to, until this burden is paid off (at the end of this year, finally!) and we can move forward.

The next point that I want to make is that this man wonders: if everyone followed this advice, would it collapse the banking industry? I'm starting to see why he's a former hedge fund manager: he wasn't very good at his job. The mortgage collapse of 2008 happened because of bad legislation that allowed under-qualified people to purchase mortgages they couldn't afford; when they walked away en masse it almost took the entire country down. The banking industry functions on trust, to a large extent, and maintaining your credit score is really the only way to prove you're trustworthy.

Finally, where is the wisdom in taking advice from a money manager who admits that he couldn't maintain his own credit rating? Red flag, much?

Please, don't follow this terrible advice. Don't let your children follow this terrible advice. It wouldn't be good for their souls, and it wouldn't be good for our economy.