You Can’t Be Anti-Gay and Pro-Family

In Pine City over the weekend, a group of gay men and women met to have a picnic.

Pine City is a small town of about 3,000 people, but still the largest city in Pine County and the county seat.  And while you would hope in 2007 that a group of gay men and women gathering would not be viewed as a threat to anything, it was.  A group of conservatives and GOP stalwarts decided that the only way they could deal with the horror of a few homosexuals eating potato salad and char-broiled burgers was to organize what they called a pro-family picnic.

Patrice DeGray called her gathering one “that allows those who believe in the God-ordained, time-tested, healthier alternative lifestyle of marriage between one man and one woman an opportunity to celebrate their uniqueness and unity around old-fashioned, traditional family values.”

But traditional family values don’t include shunning your neighbors, and repudiating your children.
more insideThis will come as a shock to some, but homosexuals are human beings.  All are children, some are parents, and many would like to be spouses.  Most of them go home to their parents’ houses for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and most of them really want nothing more than any of the rest of us want out of life: the chance to fall in love, maybe get married to the right person, maybe raise a family of their own.

At the same time DeGray and her bigoted cadre was holding their “pro-family” picnic, the daughter of the vice president was raising her son, along with her partner.  Mary Cheney, as we all know, is a lesbian.  She and her partner are forbidden by the laws of the state where they live to marry; indeed, they’re forbidden even to extend legal parental rights to both mothers.  Their son, Sam, will not automatically go to his mother, Heather Poe, should something happen to his other mother, Mary.  And yet he will know that they are both his mother, and as he grows up he will know that no matter what the laws say they are a family, because there is love in that family.

No doubt DeGray would say that what Cheney and Poe and their child are doing something that would make her “blush or vomit,” to use her lovely turn of phrase.  But I think it’s quite different. 

I think they’re raising a family, the best they can, just like millions of gay, straight, married, divorced, widowed and single parents across the country and the world.  And I think that’s a wonderful thing.  And if DeGray and her fellow bigots can look children like Samuel Cheney in the eye and tell them that their very existence is an abomination and their family is something other than “God-ordained,” she’s welcome to. 

But such an action won’t be pro-family.  Indeed, it will be as anti-family an action as can be.