Letter to my parents...I believe that jointheimpact has made me a bit of an activist of late...
Mom and Dad,
I will begin to open a dialogue with you about an issue that is very important to me. I feel its necessary. I don't want you to ever think that I do not love you, respect you or respect your faith. One of the most important lessons of my life was hearing you speak about your outreach to inmates and your personal beliefs about the death penalty. That for you, Pro-Life means Pro-Life. That includes your belief that war is the last resort and that the death penalty is wrong. Life is Life. For that, you gained my everlasting respect because you were against abortion but not hypocritically for the death penalty.
However, there is a matter that I believe you may not be fully right on. I'm not talking about your faith and your beliefs surrounding Homosexuality. But I am talking about the application of your beliefs to my life...and the translation of those beliefs into a lack of equal rights for me and my partner. As Todd and I celebrate our 9th year together on December 7, we believe now more than ever is the time for equal rights.
Again, we are not asking you to change your beliefs, but asking you to realize that what you so adamantly claim as your right, to follow your faith, you now deny those who believe differently. Again, this is not about changing your beliefs, but about your placing those beliefs upon us.
Todd and I pay our taxes. We follow the law and we are productive, contributing members of our communities, our states and our country. We simply want to be able to enjoy the rights, fully, that are guaranteed to us under the equal protection clause of the constituion. We are not asking to get married in your church. But what we are asking for is the respect and consideration and protection given to any individuals that choose to spend their lives together.
So I want to put in writing what we believe. We believe that Marriage is a religious institution. We believe that civil unions should be provided for on a state and federal level to all couples regardless of sexuality and that this civil union should be the mechanism for protection, taxes, succession etc. Marriage, as an institution, should remain where it belongs and that is in the church. If the Catholic Church or the Methodist or whatever chooses to not marry gays, then that is their right as a RELIGION. However, if our church chooses to marry us, then that is the right of our church and should be respected just as your beliefs are respected.
You would never advocate for making Jehovah Witness's observe Christmas or the specific tenants of your religion. You don't agree with their religion, but you would never advocate for making them conform to your beliefs lest you be on the receiving end of similar moves. However, with gays, your message is wholly inconsistent as you advocate forcing your beliefs on to us through law. Something you can't seem to connect is that this, in fact, is what is happening. You are forcing your beliefs onto me.
Unfortunately, in this country, Marriage is inextricably linked in both the religious and the civil. I don't believe that they will ever be "de-linked" which means that to provide equity, gays must be allowed to marry on a civil level. Because Equality for all does matter.
I close by saying I love you and including a passage I found today, that relates quite eloquently the fear that we both have about this lack of equity.
From Andrew Sullivan:
A reader writes:
"Marriage means something," said one of the speakers. This speaker then told of the sudden death of his partner of thirty-four years. They had a trust; they had papers of all kinds; they had planned and prepared for every contingency - except for a lack of respect and regard for their 34 year commitment to each other. The funeral home insisted they could not cremate this man on the word of his partner of three plus decades; they needed an OK from a family member. No document, however legal, mattered on that loss and shock filled day after the unexpected death of this speaker's partner of 34 years - thirty-four years.
Think about that when you next hear that contracts and papers are enough and marriage isn't sacred or right for these people.
We are so often told by opponents of marriage equality that they do not oppose our right to have basic legal protections. What they do not understand, because they have never had to understand, is that without legal marriage, gay couples are always subject to the veto of family members who have more say over our spouses under the law than we do.
I remember a story told me during the AIDS epidemic. A man was visiting a friend dying in hospital. It was a grim scene, as it often was in those days. The next bed in the ward had a curtain drawn around it. And from behind that curtain, you could hear someone quietly singing. The man told his friend, "Well, at least that dude is keeping his spirits up, however sick he is." And the friend replied:
"Oh, that's not the patient singing. He died this morning. And his family came to collect the body. That voice you hear is the man's partner. The family didn't approve of his relationship and they have barred him from coming to the funeral and kicked him out of their shared home. That song he's singing is the song they called their own. It was playing when they met. He used to sing it to him all the time when he was dying."
"He's still singing it even though they've taken the body away. He's singing it to an empty bed. I guess it's the last time he feels he'll ever be close to the man he loved. They were together twenty years. The hospital staff don't have the heart to ask him to leave yet."
Until you have been treated as sub-human, it's hard to appreciate how it feels. We will not give up. And we will win in part for the sake of those who never made it to see this day.
This is what my faith teaches me, whatever the Vatican insists. Our love really is stronger than their fear. " - Andrew Sullivan