King and King

UPDATE: Proposition 8 passed by a slim margin in California.

The U.S. is hitting an election on November 4th and here in California there is a proposition on the ballot that seeks to nullify a court decision earlier in the year which allowed same-sex couples to marry in California. Here is an ad currently running on TV in support of Proposition 8.



The commercial's panic is pretty humorous, but pulling the "look what it's going to do to our children" implication is often pretty effective in passing these kinds of measures. Six years ago, the voters passed an amendment to the California state constitution that defined a legal marriage to be only between a man and a woman, and this amendment was struck down as unconsitutional, thus legalizing same-sex marriage in California. Now the religious nuts trying the same thing again.

I mention it on this blog simply because it uses children in this way. The hysterics are that if nothing is done, children will not only think that being gay is OK, but will actually WANT to be gay. It poses two widely ridiculed notions that religious nuts believe, that being gay is a choice, and therefore you can make someone gay by making it accepted. The book they refer to is actually a stand-in for a real book that recently topped the list of the most banned books in the US called And Tango Makes Three. The story geared at preschoolers to third grade is about two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who make a loving couple and who desire to lay eggs and have children like other penguin couples. Instead they adopt an egg and nurture it until it hatches a daughter named Tango.

While the ad is humorous, it does get one thing right. In the state of Massachusetts, where another court decision legalizing same-sex marriage passed, it requires that public schools teach that being gay is acceptable and have a curriculum that shows gay couples as being normal. Similar things could happen in California. However, if Proposition 8 passes, then schools couldn't talk about it at all. Although I feel that it's important to talk about such questions at home when they come up, there are many households who don't discuss it all and where a child growing up gay may feel society is hostile to it. Also, many people know gay couples with children. If every child is told only stories and situations where straight couples are the only partners, then wouldn't that confuse kids about gay couples? If they aren't talked about, a child would wonder, then why aren't they?

Understanding same-sex couples isn't something that requires kids be older and have maturity. They don't understand gender roles, and in a loving household they understand that affection is normal part of life and that human beings hug and kiss each other all of the time. Kids don't care if it's two men or two women, they accept whatever their parents do. And yet, they feel it necessary to teach kids about September 11th in schools, even in kindergarten. How do you explain that to a child? Violent events are OK to teach in school, but love is not? How do you explain terrorism to a kindergartner without keeping them awake with nightmares. My daughter had to learn about 9/11 in kindergarten, but should couldn't tell me an inkling about what it meant.

Why should a married straight guy with children care about this issue? It goes beyond just a ballot proposition. To me, just having to explain why it exists breeds intolerance, a law that exists only to regress something that is more widely accepted. I want my kids to feel that being gay or having friends that are gay is OK. Most kids understand that anyway, so it creates a generational conflict to pass a law like this. Also, I have some personal experience - within my circle of friends in middle school and high school, there were four guys who we suspected were gay. My friends were all geeks of some kind or another, so my group of friends were all the social outcasts, and it was natural that gay guys would hang out with us since no one else would understand. Of course, in the eighties and in a conservative city like I grew up in it was common to make passing jokes and innuendoes that gay was a synonym for anything derisive. I made such suggestions, too. The eighties was also a strange time. The hypermasculine intersected with gay culture in places like music, but gay figures such as Boy George were seen as cultural artifacts and not real. One of the old money elite in my school called me gay because I crossed my legs in class, to give you an idea of the homosexual panic that was going on. That guy, by the way, the product of patrician WASP-y family, was at my ten year reunion, fat, drunk and jobless.

Out of that environment, two of the four gay friends I had in school committed suicide by the age of twenty-five. One, not realizing that he was gay slept with another friend and couldn't deal with the ostracizing he got from his family and his own guilt, so he hung himself. Another just practiced whatever extreme of life he could, doing drugs and killing himself slowly until he hastened it along by swallowing a bottle of pills.

Had they been just told in school early on that being gay was OK, maybe they would still be around.