Kylie, Ohio (3/17/21)
My parents divorced when I was a toddler and are both currently remarried. My mom and I moved in with my grandparents shortly after the divorce, and my grandma was pretty much the one who raised me. Growing up, I was shaped to believe in religious and mostly-Conservative views. My family never discussed or really understood politics; they just believed in being Republican because that's the party most commonly associated with religion. They believed that being gay was bad, because the bible. They used racist terms constantly because they were never taught that wasn't okay. But overall, they didn't get worked up over anything, and they were generally polite people. As for my dad, he was out of the picture a lot until I was about 15. He seemed like a fairly logical person, but holy sh*t --- was I wrong.
I dismissed religion when I was 12, but I still held onto Conservative beliefs for some time after that because I was never exposed to anything different than that. I thought what my grandparents and mom taught me was correct. When I moved out with my boyfriend at the age of 18, I got away from that and started to learn different points of view from work, college, and just being out in the world. Since then, I've done a complete 180 and am now liberal. I believe in human rights, caring for the environment, and trying to be a decent person. My family is not a fan of that.
Since the 2016 election, I've watched my mother, stepdad, father, and stepmom all fall into the void that is the far-right cult. My stepdad has always been a huge Trump supporter, and spewing hate has consumed his social media over the last 6 years. He also frequents Fox News and was on Parlour before that got shut down. My mom just goes along with with the Trump stuff because she likes to feel included and is unable to form opinions of her own; my mom has also converted my stepdad from being an atheist to a becoming a Christian. They do not have any friends and live with my stepdad's mother, so they're all essentially left to marinate in their twisted, far-right, religious, hateful views and refuse to believe anything different.
I live out of state because I don't want to deal with that. I'm liberal and bisexual. My fiancé is the same. My stepdad has tried starting political arguments with both of us during visits. My mom tries to stay out of things like that, but she has tried pushing her thoughts and beliefs onto me a lot over text. If my fiancé and I were not family to them, they would want us dead like every other Democrat.
My stepdad has said that Democrats are a plague that need to be eradicated. My mom always says that she doesn't agree with that but does nothing to try stopping him from saying things like that. I blocked my stepdad on Facebook because I didn't want to see all of that hate (because I'm included in the group he's hating on), and when he found out, he played the victim to my mom, and she gave me a good scolding about how he can say whatever he wants - that I should just "deal with it" and that my feelings are basically invalid.
My dad abandoned his family to devote everything to my stepmom and her children a long time ago, so my stepmom's beliefs are his beliefs. The only people that they socialize with now are my stepbrother and his wife. Right before the 2020 election, my dad sold his house, threw everything in storage, and he and my stepmom quit their jobs to go live in the mountains of Tennessee because they truly believed that if Biden won, the "communists" (liberals) were going to take over society --- that's right: they do not own a house! They "live off the land" now. They were fed all of that nonsense by my stepbrother, who gets all of his information from Facebook and conspiracy videos on YouTube (he and his wife are also anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, and are freaking out about 5G). When my dad told me why they were making the move out into nowhere, I was heartbroken. I thought that my dad was capable of seeing through the bullsh*t, but I was sorely mistaken.
I don't know how to talk to any of my parents anymore, and part of me doesn't even want to. I don't know my mom or dad anymore. They've completely changed and have jumped off the deep end. I don't think that there's any coming back from this anytime soon because of their situations and who they are surrounded by. I've contemplated cutting all of them out of my life because the stress of having to bite my tongue and tiptoe around conversations is getting to be too much for me.