No, I’m Not Mourning the Wicked

When I heard the news this morning that Lindsey Graham had died, I felt what most women in my community did - joy.

I was relieved, and there was a little celebration mixed into that relief, because Lindsey Graham spent decades using enormous political power to cause very real harm.

He helped authorize the Iraq War and remained one of Washington’s loudest advocates for military intervention around the world. He fought to repeal health-care protections, opposed marriage equality, introduced a federal abortion ban, and helped build the conservative Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he helped move Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation forward only weeks before the 2020 election, abandoning the very election-year standard he had previously claimed to support. He recognized Donald Trump as dangerous before becoming one of his most dependable defenders and helping return him to power.

And don’t even get me started on his accusations of harming children.

That is only a brief walk through the wreckage, but it is enough to explain why I did not meet the news of his death with sorrow.

I met it with the kind of relief people sometimes feel when they learn that an abuser has died. The harm already happened, the scars remain. There may never be anything resembling justice for the people who suffered. But at least the door is finally closed against any new damage from that particular hand.

And I am tired of being told that good women must mourn every powerful man politely, regardless of how much suffering he helped create.

There is an old expectation that settles over women whenever a man dies, especially a man with status, authority, or a respectable title engraved on the office door. We are expected to summon sympathy whether we feel it or not. We are expected to lower our eyes, speak vaguely about his mistakes, and grant him a dignity in death that he may have spent his entire life refusing to extend to anyone else.

They call that being ladylike. I call it protecting predators.

Women have been trained to protect men for generations, whether those men are living or dead. Many of us grew up watching churches and communities shelter men who abused women and children because holding them accountable might damage their reputations, their families, or their positions of authority.

Girls were handed responsibility for the behavior of boys based on the clothes we wore, the way we spoke, and the simple fact that we existed in bodies someone else had decided were dangerous.

The men who caused harm were granted excuses.
The girls who survived it were given rules.

That same machinery is still humming beneath the demand for reverence today. A powerful man can spend decades voting to control women’s bodies, restrict other people’s marriages, send human beings into wars, strip families of health care, and protect a political movement built on cruelty. Yet somehow the woman who smiles when he can no longer do those things becomes the moral emergency.

Her reaction is examined more closely than his record. Her tone becomes more offensive than his actions.

Her refusal to perform sympathy is treated as evidence of a defective soul, while the suffering he helped create is folded neatly into the obituary and tucked out of sight.

Religion has been particularly useful in teaching women to participate in this emotional laundering. We were told to forgive endlessly, to remain soft no matter how hard we were struck, and to leave judgment somewhere outside ourselves. Anger made us bitter. Refusing reconciliation made us the problem.

All of it trained women to distrust our own emotional truth while preserving the systems that harmed us. I am done with that bargain.

I do not believe death erases a person’s choices, and I do not believe honesty becomes cruelty the moment a heartbeat stops. People who loved Lindsey Graham are entitled to their grief. I am equally entitled to feel relieved that he will never cast another vote against my freedom, usher another judge onto the federal bench, advocate for another war, or offer another ounce of political legitimacy to Donald Trump.

My emotions do not require public approval before I am allowed to feel them. Neither do yours.

You do not have to make your anger prettier. You do not have to manufacture tenderness for someone whose power made your life more dangerous. You do not have to become acceptable according to standards that were designed to dismiss you all along.

When women stop giving a fuck about those standards, we regain authority over ourselves. We become more aligned in our personal lives and more effective in our communities because our energy is no longer being spent performing goodness for the comfort of people invested in our silence.

So honor your own emotions. Trust the truth that rises in your body before the world rushes in to correct it. Protect your magic from anyone who believes womanhood is an obligation to remain endlessly pleasant in the presence of harm.

And when society looks at a woman who thinks for herself, feels for herself, and refuses to mourn on command, then declares her unacceptable, I hope she lifts her glass and smiles.