"Deadline: White House" w/Nicolle Wallace will follow "The Last Word" tonight ...

[Hekate]

12. Haven't you ever met someone who calls themselves a "recovering Catholic"?

I've always heard it in religious contexts -- Mormons, Evangelicals, or Roman Catholics who have bowed out of the authoritarian religion of their parents. They have reached some personal breaking point, and can't abide it any more. They cannot bring themselves to sit in the pews any more and be lectured at, to perform ceremonies they no longer believe.

Their parents and siblings don't know what brought it on and to varying degrees are hurt, alarmed, or angry. Explanations don't help.

The "recovering" person still loves their family (absent abuse), and all their deepest memories of love and belonging are wrapped up in shared events that go back to their birth. But they are alienated forever, even (or especially) when they go home for the holidays, Holy Days, for weddings, christenings, and funerals.

I have known folks like that, and the bind is that it hurts to be in that space but it hurts worse to deny your own authenticity and your own conscience, to deny the evidence of your own eyes.

I hear all those echoes when Nicolle refers to her own family, whom she loves. "When I go home for Thanksgiving, it's still Trump-land. They don't get it." And when Steve Schmidt says declaratively that he is no longer a Republican, that there is moral rot at its core and the best thing is for it to be wiped out over the next several election cycles and start over, Nicolle murmurs, "I'm a recovering Republican," I hear the pain of betrayal.

Thus sayeth Hekate; end of sermon.