My family includes a farmer and a fiber artist in rural Kentucky, who rarely miss a Sunday service at their local Baptist church; a retired Jewish banker on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; a theater director in Florida; a contractor in Louisville; a lawyer in Boston; and a gay Republican. Talking about politics at our family gatherings can be like smoking a cigarette at a gas station'there's a good chance it will make the whole place explode. What's always impressed me about our big, mixed-up family is not just that we survive Christmas dinner, but also that the family includes several couples who disagree politically with the people they live with every day: their own spouses. They haven't voted for the same candidate, much less for the same party, in years. For a long time, those differences were mostly an annoyance that flared around elections, but over the past few years they've become far more stressful for those couples to navigate. Especially now, when the country is so...
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