I tend to stay away from politics on my blog and social media. I’ve never found those to be good platforms for that type of discourse, not to mention I have no interest in interacting with the immense number of trolls out there in the internet depths just waiting to lash out at people. So I tend to keep it to myself. However, with the recent Supreme Court ruling that has essentially opened the gates for Marriage Equality to spread across the country, I felt the need to say something.
I grew up in a small mountain town in Colorado. Technically speaking, it wasn’t even big enough to be a town, it was a village. I grew up in the suburb of a village – and you thought that there was nothing to do where you grew up! Needless to say, there wasn’t a whole lot of diversity around. I was eighteen years-old when I had my first conversation with an African American person. Let that boggle your mind for a while. There was however, a lesbian couple. One of the women worked in the middle school as a gym teacher, and despite the fact that she was always extremely professional there would occasionally be titters around the locker room like:
“I think she saw me changing clothes, how gross!”
“If you’re nice to her, she’ll turn you into a lesbian too.”
“Have you seen? They have matching lesbian haircuts.”
It always bothered me when I would hear things like this. Gym was never my favorite class as I generally had one injury or another and couldn’t participate, which of course meant that gym teachers never really liked me much. Despite this, it still bothered me to hear people talking behind her back simply because she was a lesbian. Judging her based upon who she loved. But no matter how much it bothered me, I never said anything, and I don’t know why. Maybe it was because I was afraid that that ridicule would be redirected at me and I didn’t need another reason to hate life. Maybe it was because I didn’t understand why it bothered me. Deep down I felt that what was going on was wrong, but since it seemed to be the norm maybe I was wrong and they weren’t. Who knows?
What I do know, is that I wish I would have said something. I wish I would have had the guts to call them out and ask them to stop. Not because I wanted the approval of our gym teacher, but because somehow, despite the small mountain town upbringing I’d received, I knew that it was wrong, and sitting there pretending that I didn’t hear it made me just as culpable.
I didn’t say anything then, and for that I am sorry. I can, however, say something now. I am a huge proponent of marriage equality, and for every state that starts issuing same-sex marriage certificates a part of me lightens and feels better about the state of this world that we live in. There are such better things to be spending money on than trying to block the right of two people to get married. Love is love. Whether love be between a man and a woman, a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, it is the same love. Each and every one of those people deserves the right to stand up in front of their friends and family and declare that love publicly.
I have been to both gay and straight weddings and in each one there are the same shy hesitations from being up in front of a crowd. There are the same awkward fumbles over lines or missing props. There are the same rolling eyes from kids in the wedding party who have already had their picture taken 500 times and don’t want to pose for any more. And there are the same tears of joy that well up and spill over when a bride or a groom finally realizes that they are standing in front of their soul-mate and that they are finally bound together by more than just words.
The love is the same, the rights should be the same. I stand for marriage equality and I’m no longer willing to keep quiet simply because I might become a target.
