I know I've posted way too much on this subject but it continues to just blow my mind. So today I'm watching a debate of sorts on WUSA news. The anchor was talking to two reverends about gay marriage. One was for and the other against. Now not that it matters but the one against was younger and black and the one for was older and white. I just find that slightly ironic. The anchor was asking questions regarding why people were against gay marriage and the reverend against said, "just the word "marriage."" All this fuss over a word. I mean I get it from both sides really but as Dan Savage says women are no longer considered the property of men and you can't get a wife with a few goats anymore, so we've already redefined marriage. Gay people don't think it's equal rights unless it's Marriage and not a civil union, and straight conservatives see it as a religious act between one man and one woman. I get that.
The part that blew my mind was the reverend against said something about "the children" and the anchor said statistically we know that being raised by a same sex couple doesn't harm children. The reverend argued that that remains to be seen as gay marriage isn't legal, suggesting that it could still be harmful to children. This is the part that blew my mind.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s. In many states it was illegal for a black person and a white person to marry. In fact, and as I've mentioned before, the last of the laws restricting interracial marriage was repealed in 2000 in Alabama. Later in, I think it was 2007, a biracial couple went to a Alabama justice of the peace to get married and he refused to marry them because they were bi-racial. The couple sued the state and the justice and he lost his job.
So in my years I've heard peoples opinions on interracial couples and the one thing I've always heard is, "It's the children that suffer." Meaning they aren't white and aren't black and won't be accepted by either. An Aside, Although I know people who've been bullied tend to become bullies, I just find it hard to wrap my mind around prejudiced black people, even though I've met quite a few. You would just think that people who've been shown prejudice for something they didn't do, can't control, and shouldn't really even matter, like the color of their skin, would be more sensitive to all kinds of prejudices. You'd think after it happened to you, seeing it happen to others would at very least leave a bad taste in your mouth. For some it just doesn't though and I'll never get it.
So now I've strayed from the point. Prejudice people have been saying for years that interracial marriage hurts the children, and now they are doing the same with gay marriage. plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (an epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes (“The Wasps”). Literally “The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.” It's just that in our personal lives we keep repeating the same patterns, and it seems we do it socially as well.
One thing the reverend who was for gay marriage said that I really liked. He said that we've made social changes in the name of rights for other groups and now it's the gay peoples turn. Finally!
