My mother doesn't have a racist bone in her body. Sure, she had some terrifying moments when she questioned her church after they changed policy and allowed black men to hold the priesthood and get offices in her church. But, she magnanimously decided that if God could forgive the descendants of Cain after 7,000 years, she could too.
And yes, she was very upset when she found out that the new police officer in town had married a black woman and brought her there to live. That Supreme Court sure did screw up when they decided Loving vs. State of Virginia. But at least they didn't have children. Mulatto children have such a hard time with teasing. My mother doesn't like that kind of teasing. It's not right to make the children pay for their parents' poor choices. Besides, they only lived there for 6 months, then he got a transfer to a bigger town in another state. It worked out best all the way around. No, she's never had a black person to dinner - or even to sit in her living room. But that doesn't mean anything. She knows the man my father used to commute to work with wouldn't have wanted to come in the house anyway and she didn't want to make him uncomfortable by asking. She's only concerned with the well-being of others. Especially the poor children, who didn't ask to be brought into a mixed-race marriage. Those poor children. But she likes black people. Really. And she's not racist. How could you even think to she might be something vile and hateful like a racist?
I thought about my mother a lot yesterday, after I read a post by someone who "genuinely likes gay people", but argued that we shouldn't ask for marriage. We should be perfectly happy with civil unions or domestic partnership, or whatever else they decide to call a separate institution made up special, just for us. The argument was a religious one. That some - maybe most? - religious people feel marriage is a purely religious sacrament and gays will defile and destroy that sacrament. Gay folk should respect that and not try for marriage in order to protect the delicate sensibilities of the religious folk.
Oh, where to begin? With the assumption that gay folk can't possibly be religious? With the assumption that any church that would want to perform over a marriage for a same-sex couple is less legitimate than the ones that tell us we'll burn in hell and so we should ignore their religious viewpoint? With the assumption that simple back-mind knowledge that somewhere there's a gay couple with a marriage license would so horribly offend the sensibilities of the religious folks that we have no choice but to respect their outrage? No, I think I'd like to start with prejudice and discrimination.
Prejudice is an insidious thing. I was raised with it, and it's almost second nature to me. To fight it, I have to even monitor what I think and feel in random situations. If someone pulls into a parking space I've been waiting for, did I curse something different because they were black/hispanic/asian/female/cowboy instead of a liberal gay white male? Did I get more upset than I would have if it were a liberal gay white male? I pull it out and look at it. I look at my motivation for it, and I try to track it back to its roots and kill it. It's been a 20+ year struggle, and I'm not close to finished yet. I'll probably never be finished. Before I started really working on it, it affected me in ways I never even guessed at. It affected the assumptions I made about other people. It affected which co-workers I said hello to, and which I approached to go to lunch. It affected what curse I said in my mind when someone cut me off on the street or in a parking lot, and it all fed back into my worldview, to color what I saw when I looked at someone who dared to be different than I am. It changed what I thought they could reasonably expect from the world towards them. "Well, of course he's never going to get a job if he keeps his hair looking like that. And did you hear the way he talked?" Maybe I was talking about an inner-city African-American, or maybe it was a Mexican-American, or maybe I was talking about a very nelly and swishy gay man. I wasn't like that. I was a man, who happened to be gay, and I really had no patience for the nelly ones. No fats or fems in my little circle, thank you very much. See, I could even be prejudiced against my own group, I didn't need straight people to do it for me.
There wasn't an epiphany - there was no single moment when I suddenly saw the world with new eyes and realized what I'd been doing. It came in little fits and starts, with lots and lots of backsliding. Every minute that I'm not clawing to get out of the hole prejudice has dug for me and that keeps me from seeing the world around me clearly, is a minute that I slide a little further back into that hole.
I'm a human being. That's the very first thing. I have my talents and my faults, and which bunch is larger depends on what you can decide to tolerate. I have hopes and dreams and fears and I'll bet I share most of them with everybody else on here. Oh, yeah, and I'm lucky enough to have shared my life for the last 15 years with an absolutely wonderful person, and I would love nothing more than to be able to shout from the rooftops that we're a couple, that we matter to each other, and that our happiness comes, in large part, from sharing our lives, hopes, dreams and fears with each other. When you find yourself thinking that maybe I'm not that important, or that my relationship isn't that important, or that I'm asking for too much to want it recognized the way a straight couple's relationship is recognized - well, maybe that says a lot more about who you are than about who I am.