Weaver's Web

I swear sometimes I hate that I understand John Boehner. The man gets emotional about things he cares about and at times, he cries. In public.

And, so do I.

There's the cynical part of me that feels Boehner's being manipulative when the water works turn on, likely because I detest his politics so, but truth told, I feel he cannot help it when the tears start to flow, because so often I cannot stop my own.

I was just here at my computer and came across the Vote Yes video for the Irish referendum this past May, on marriage for same sex couples. It was a momentous vote of support for the entire LGBT community in Ireland and the first national referendum anywhere in the world on marriage for our community. Now I have posted before just how unnerved I am to have anyone's civil rights put to a popular vote; even more so when that someone happens to be me, but that the vote went the way it did is such an affirmation, that I cried when it came down. Even just watching the video, which featured many of the best known actors in Ireland today, playing people going to the polls to vote for the measure, I was once again in tears. The knowledge that thousands of young Irish people who were living abroad, flew home just to vote for that referendum, which then passed in every county save one (where it lost narrowly) has brought me to tears more than once.

There's an Expedia commercial currently running which in its second scene has a young male couple with an adopted infant getting out of a cab in front of a SF home. Extended family is rushing out to meet them, while the voice over says something to the effect of "we take you somewhere you never thought you would go"; without fail, my eyes well up every time I see it.

I was speaking with a dear friend earlier today, who said something to me for which I'm so grateful. Her parents divorced when she and her sister were very young and her dad remarried. He lives here within the county, no more that 20 minutes away, but still they're not close and she feels sad he doesn't really play the role of father/patriarch for her and her children (the youngest of whom, now 4, I delivered). However, the more she thought about it, she said she realized that I've become the father/grandfather figure in their lives. Jokingly she concluded, she upgraded to me and to my husband, from her own father. I cherish them and I wouldn't have my relationship with them any way other way than the closeness & love we feel for one another, such is the nature of chosen family. However, how many LGBT people have been ostracized and distant from their families of origin and forming chosen family was the only option for them?

Today, as I see the changes in our larger society and marriages such as mine codified into law and accepted by our families and communities of origin, marriages that more and more involve the rearing of children that are ours, either by adoption, fostering, or technologies such as AI or surrogacy, the option to raise families of our own is our right, if we so choose. In my 20's I never considered becoming a husband or a father to be a viable option for me. Today, I awaken each morning next to the man who IS my husband. Were we 20 again, might we have children of our own? Knowing us, I suspect probably so.

Which likely is why the Expedia commercial brings me to tears.

Kerry Washington was given this years Vangard award by GLAAD. As someone who has always identified as a minority person (and you cannot get much whiter than I, unless you're either an ice blonde or an albino), her discussion of 'otherness' really speaks to me. As long as we who are identified as the other, allow the powered elite to continue to play people of color against the LGBT communities against women against linguistic minorities against the disabled, etc. we will remain fractious and powerless.

Is it not time for those of us who are the other to really embrace E Pluribus Unum?

We're 10 days from the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr delivered his "I have a dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Such a pivotal moment in the history of this country.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

I was 8 when I heard that speech on TV, carried I think on the nightly news with Walter Cronkite, only hours after Dr King uttered them.

His words hit home with a kid who was just starting to come to terms with the scope of what horrors our species is capable of. I had only recently noticed on the arms of a couple of our neighbors, Sol and Selina, the serial numbers tattooed there. I don't remember which concentration camp they'd survived, but they had survived, unlike most of their family. They couldn't have been more than teenagers when they went to the camps.

Seeing images, as I grew, of lynchings, of police with water cannons aimed at unarmed black protesters, of police dogs snarling at innocents, I could not shake the comparison from my mind of what had befallen 6 million of Europe's Jews, including most of my maternal grandmother's family.

Dr King spoke to me that evening, as he spoke to all in this country. I at least was in a place that I heard him, and his words still echo in my soul 50 years later.

"And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"