Choosing Our Family

Posted on by

Imagine you are with the person you love. You are having a wonderful, blissfully peaceful Friday night after a hard week at work. You both just want to melt into each others’ arms for two or three hours and watch Netflix, and for a little while you do.

But then your love grunts uncomfortably. They grab their chest and complain of being light-headed. You are both getting to your middle years, and they’re carrying a few more pounds than either of you is comfortable with. You never did get around to joining the gym or trying that diet your GP suggested. Your own heart starts racing, but you manage not to panic and call 911. Your love, clutching their chest now, takes out their own phone to text their family to let them know which hospital you will be going to.

You put on your brave face for them, choking back tears on the ambulance ride as you hold their hand. They pat yours to let you know it will all be okay and you try not to cry and laugh at the same time at how ridiculous it is that they are comforting you at a time like this. The EMT mechanically goes about asking all the appropriate questions, taking your love’s blood pressure and a dozen other things, pushing you gently out of the way as he does so, and you mostly succeed at not taking it personally.

At the hospital your love has fallen unconscious and you find yourself answering a hundred questions: what did they have to eat, what allergies do they have, does heart disease run in the family and so many others that you do your best to answer. For half an hour you watch as they poke and prod and probe the most important person in your world and they look so helpless and you wish they could hear you when you tell them that it will all be OK.

Then the doctor puts her hand on your arm and tells you your love’s family is here. They guide you out of the little cubicle and you greet their father, mother, brothers and sister. They ask if your love is in pain and you cannot answer, and then their father speaks up. He tells you that the family wants you to know they respect your choice, but it has been hard for them, and it has caused divisions and fights and it would just be easier if you waited for word at home.

You cry and you want to fight and you argue a little. The mother asks you not to make a scene as the oldest brother talks to a security guard. You want to stay, you want to tell them they can’t make you leave, but the thing is they can. You are not married, you can’t be, because he is white and you are black. He dared to fall in love with a black woman and you remember, especially now, being so proud of this man who dared to stand up to his father when he brought you to his family’s home for the first time.

Now all you can do is go, rushing out the door angry and scared and hurt before the guard can escort you. You go home and wait for the nowhere near frequent enough calls from his sister, the only member of the family to stand up for the two of you. Two days later you get the call from her: he has passed. They let you come to the funeral, so long as you stand in back. Your whole world is coming down around you and though they love you, some of your own family cannot help but offer thinly veiled “we told you so”s.

Does that sound far-fetched to you? Well it shouldn’t. We are less than half a century removed from that being the case in some parts of our country. It is a horribly painful reality that gay couples in most states must now live through. The only option preventing this in some places is terribly expensive lawyers fees to draw up living wills, contracts and proxy arrangements. So when you say you support initiatives like North Carolina’s Amendment 1, you are supporting exactly the kind of cruelty described above.

If you oppose marriage equality, you support denying people the right to choose their own family. You cannot do so without exposing yourself as a horribly cruel human being. Does that sound harsh? I hope so because it is meant to be. It is significantly less harsh than being denied the right to see your love in the hospital, or them not getting shared custody of their child, or not being able to put you on their health insurance, or being granted the simple, humane pleasure of being able to take that person’s name as your own. So before you cry that I am being mean to you for calling you out for your bigotry, take a few minutes, or better yet, the next 24 hours if you live in North Carolina, and reflect on how much meaner a state with Amendment 1 would be.

Article 16

Posted on by

(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protections by society and the State.

It would be so easy to make this about the gay marriage debate. So I will, although I will touch on other issues too.  Some people will read the first clause of this article and say “see, even the UN says men and women. They know that marriage is between two people of opposite sex.” Of course, the other articles often fall back on the use of male pronouns and I am pretty sure they meant for women to be covered in those discussions as well. Many of these same people would gloss over that “equal rights… during marriage” part of the clause.

I have a very hard time believing that the people who penned the Universal Declaration of Human rights would be deliberately hetero-sexist in constructing this Article. The whole point of the Declaration is to affirm human dignity. Denying marriage equality flies in the face of that mission. Besides, there is also this article’s third clause to consider.

The authors of the Declaration realized the importance of family. It is the first community any one belongs to. All other communities grow from it. Indeed, we often refer to our larger society as our family. The right to marry who you want is the right to decide who your family is. No outsider should be able to dictate that. Yet so many do.

So many still see marriage as not just between a man and a woman, but as an acquisition by the man. I wish I could say this was only the case in third world countries with arranged marriage, but there are sects of Christianity in our country that hold that the “wife is subject to her husband.” One of those people actually tried to be President (or would her husband have been the de facto President?)

To those that enjoy male, hetero privilege, marriage, if not the last line, is an important line of defense of that privilege. It asserts their dominance over women and, by keeping it out of the hands of non-heterosexuals, it asserts the preferred status of their sexuality. Not all straight men do this deliberately, but all enjoy its benefits, even those that openly fight against that system (and for whom I am grateful.) This article at least recognizes some of that, and hopefully, with greater discussion, all societies will recognize all of it.

F*** Yeah Starbucks!!!!

Posted on by

Today is a good day. Today is an over the top, I want to shout “I love you world” at the top of my lungs kind of day. Today is one of those days that I hope I never forget. March 28, 2012, the day I learned that not only did Starbucks tell the National Organization for Marriage, a group of anti-gay hate mongers, that they cared not about their boycott, but that Starbucks’s patrons said “yeah, us too!”

At the risk of sounding condescending, I am so very proud of you America. There have been times that I was afraid that you were ruled by bigots and seriously old-school zealots.  So many of us that have been in their cross hairs have felt abandoned by our countrymen, who have told us again and again that they support us, but have so often been silent as these demagogues claim to have righteousness and numbers on their side. You stood up with and for us and told them, “no, you have neither.”

All this on the heels of JCPenny standing by Ellen DeGeneres (don’t think I’ve forgotten you guys.) All this on the heels of the Girl Scouts standing by a young trans woman in their midst. All this on the heels of my home state of New York finally joining the ranks of states that have accepted marriage equality. At the risk of sounding cliche: it really does get better.

Too often it is easy to pay attention to all those that hate us so much. They are loud, they are mean and quite frankly scary. We are not alone however, and America thank you so much for showing us that. We are not a perfect people, we never have been, there is so much work to be done for so many groups that get forgotten, but today, today you have shown me you can walk the walk when you choose to.