This may seem like an odd question, but it's an important one: how do you bring up a controversial topic with a caregiver, assuming the subject is unavoidable?
Our situation is this: we finally (this week) got a caregiver in place for my grandmother, who has dementia. We all like the new caregiver very much; she's very sweet. However, she is also very religious, and herein may lie a problem.
My whole family (my grandmother, mother and I), and I especially, are very involved in gay rights, gay issues, and the LGBT community. To that end, we discuss gay-rights issues frequently, either as a topic of conversation (like the California ruling on same-sex marriage) or as a daily detail (as a family, we boycott Exxon-Mobil because of how they treat their LGBT employees; my grandmother remembers that we boycott them, but frequently has to ask why). I also spend a lot of time at my school's GLASA (Gay, Lesbian, And Straight Alliance), and since my grandmother always wants to know what I did during the day, I tend to recount my experiences there.
The question is, how do we introduce this subject to the caregiver? As I said, she's very pious and quite traditional; while I can't be sure until I raise the subjet, my guess is that she believes homosexuality is wrong. We don't want to upset her or make her feel as though her beliefs and opinions are being trampled on, but at the same time, we're all too entrenched in the subject to ignore it completely (trust me: I tried yesterday, and all that happened was I sounded like I was playing Taboo!). Is there a good way to deal with this issue?
(For the record: we all tend to spend a great deal of time together; also, while no one in our immediate family is gay, several friends and relatives are, and we speak of them with nothing but love. So the topic WILL eventually come to a head no matter what.)
