Equality Opponents, Take Heart!
I just returned from (yet another) symposium on LGBT rights. You won’t find anything about my narrow legal topic in this post. (The law types among you n find a draft of the article on which it’s based here.) Instead, I’d like to relate a sad story that the keynote speaker told the assemblage.
A few years ago, he and his (same-sex) spouse moved into a new neighborhood. Their seven-year-old son loved and was quite good at baseball, and joined a team. A few days into things, some of the other kids kept using the word “gay” in a derogatory way (as in: “that’s so gay”) that this boy didn’t understand. Naively, he told them that “his two dads were gay.” For the rest of the practice session, the other kids humiliated and mocked this child, who came home in tears and never wanted to play baseball again.
Where did this take sadly familiar story place? In some benighted province where the word “gay” is never spoken? No…in Massachusetts, the supposed gay mecca of the U.S., where gays can marry and “the straights” cower in fear for a way of life that’s vanishing before their eyes, as gay marriage and respect for gay families is supposedly force-taught in schools. (Read this chilling, first-person account of what’s happened already!) And the speaker, Jarrett Barrios, is a former state legislator and the current President of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (”GLAAD“).
Are the efforts of marriage equality opponents to present themselves as the “victims” of discrimination convincing anyone? And if they are, perhaps stories like this one can serve as a reminder that the majority isn’t suffering under some oppressive yoke. Indeed, whatever gay-inclusive education is supposedly being force-fed clearly isn’t taking, at least not yet, at least not fully. Equality opponents, take heart!
And what if education, law, and just plain familiarity do change people’s view about Jarrett’s family? Would that really be so very bad? Do the folks at the National Organization for Marriage care about any of these kids, and their lives, or only about some abstract harms to their worldview? Just asking.
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