IF IT WEREN'T for the darned "loving my girlfriend" thing, rampant self-righteousness in the lesbian community would have driven me into one of those boy/girl mixed marriages by now.

The ridiculous thing is that this unbearable groupthink is a perversion (and not the good kind) of a pretty reasonable thought process. "I'm a lesbian. I am oppressed. It follows that I should look more deeply at other's differences, be more self-aware of how I see and treat other people, and consequently, treat everyone with equal respect and kindness." This is probably the simplest way to live a good life. Couple this philosophy with a sense of responsibility to yourself and others, and you're pretty much good to go.

Unfortunately for some women, the fact that they are oppressed as lesbians has given them not an understanding of folks' similarities, but a bully pulpit. And self-righteousness mutates from annoying to culturally toxic when it reaches critical mass and is used to control, punish, and censor people who don't fall in with the party line.

Will Critical Mass Lesbian Self-Righteousness™ survive the great assimilation? No. It requires outsider status to feed the anger and jealousy and paranoia that breed it. Lesbians banding together to deny an individual woman the support of a particular circle will no longer mean her exclusion from the only place she can be herself. And if the girls at the Wildrose don't dig her, she can go be queer at Shoney's.