This began as a comment on a diary I read this morning which really got to me. I sat after reading it with tears running down my face, again. I was shaking with shame and anger. Shame for my country, anger for my countrymen. This is not my America. This is supposed to be the land of the free. Bullshit.
As I said up above, I began this as a comment on the above-mentioned diary, and I'm not sure that this technically qualifies as a real diary because of it's brevity, but after I got to three paragraphs I figured it might.
I'm on vacation right now with my mother-in-law, and my wife, and her cousin in sunny Florida. Yesterday I was out driving my Hertz car, and I had this thought: if my wife and I were a gay couple she would have had to come pick me up at the airport and she would have had to show her drivers license if she wanted to be able to drive this car. When I rented the car I told the woman at the counter that I wanted my wife to be able to drive the car, but she wasn't at the airport with me. The nice woman behind the counter said, "Oh, that's OK, if you're married she can drive and we don't need to see a license."
I am white, I am straight, and I am male. I have a tremendous amount in my life that I have taken for granted. I enjoy freedom in my daily life that I'm not necessarily even aware on a conscious level that I am privileged to have. This thought was a simple thing, stupid really, but it suddenly crystallized for me what same sex marriage really means for millions of LGBT Americans. I have gay family members, and I've been a supporter of equality for LGBT people for my entire life, but it's a thousand little things like this that straight people take for granted that make the difference between the freedom of equality and the repression of inequality. It's big things too, of course, like beneficiary rights, and the ability to make life and death medical decisions for one's partner, but it's these little daily simple things that truly affect one's quality of life.
We need to work harder to educate those who are blinded by their religion or their upbringing to fear what they do not understand. This work begins with me saying that I will work harder to achieve this in the future. This loss in Maine, if nothing else, has galvanized this straight white man to do more for my LGBT countrymen.
And here come the tears again. This has got to be done. We've got to fix this flaw in our culture because it's really unseemly for a mature adult male like me to be bursting out in tears this way.