If Marriage Is So Gay, How Come We're Not...

People love to get themselves excited. Some people get themselves excited about marriage. Sometimes they get so excited; they're downright gay about it.

That may be more excitement then is good for us. When my daughter was in her last semester of undergraduate work, she was studying in London (though it was an overseas program of her American college). We've always had a close relationship, so we chatted with her on the phone about every week.

One week she told us that she was engaged. This was a big surprise, as we hadn't known that she was even "going with" anybody, and our daughter has never been one to keep big secrets from us or spring big surprises out of the blue on us. When we reacted with some surprise, she indicated that she was engaged to her college roommate. Now this wasn't any avant-garde dorm where boys and girls live together; although she had moved out of a dorm by her junior year, she was still living with the same (female) roommate she had roomed with since her sophomore year.

I'm now 63 years old. When I was young, I pretty much absorbed society's prejudices about homosexuals, though I don't think I ever picked on any. (It would have been difficult in that I didn't know any, or at least not any ones who were "out" in public.)

Over time, my attitudes evolved toward tolerance. I not only met homosexuals, I met people, including some fairly macho men, who were tolerant of homosexuals. I lived and worked in multi-racial and religiously diverse communities, and saw that problems involving people learning to live together in tolerance in regard to racial and religious differences was not all that different in regard to sexual orientation differences (though many think there is a BIG difference).

I was a public school teacher for a while, and observed how easily children taunt, tease, and scapegoat each other. Accusations of being "queer" are one of the most frequent stimuli for children picking on each other, and difficult to change and discourage.

So by the time my daughter "came out to me," my ideology was pretty far along to being accepting of homosexuals as "real people." Even so, there's frequently a gap between a value one holds as an abstraction or a principle, and one that comes as close to home as involving one's own child. There was no argument or conflict, but it took me about a week to get my idea around the realization that my daughter is in a relationship with another woman and regard it without a little asterisk in my mind.

It's quite a few years later. My daughter and her partner have been together for about a decade and a half. They have a three-year-old daughter, born through artificial insemination. (Dad is a fellow graduate of the same school. Although he has given up any claim to parental rites, he is involved in the life of his daughter, though they haven't decided what he will be called).

As far as my wife and I are concerned, my daughter and her "out of law" partner are two of the most happily and successfully married people we know. Our granddaughter (about to have her 3rd birthday a week after my 63rd) is our granddaughter without any asterisks though there's no genetic link. However, they are not married in any legal sense. They have tried to do as much as they sensibly can to protect their rights as parents and as partners through legal arrangements, but they have not tried to "get married" in Canada or Massachusetts or any other venue in any conventional legal sense.

I will add my thoughts on gay marriage in a second article to come as soon as I get around to it. Be scared. Be very scared of Grandpa Random.