So it’s Really Swell how Chick Fil A has brought people together to discuss what rights, if any, they’re willing to grant their gay neighbors. Behold the Wonder of Food. In Ancient times we would break bread together and discuss matters close to the heart. Now we eat junk food and get our arteries hardened. Some gay friends of mine on Facebook tell me lately that I’m not the only gay American in my friends list having this conversation with their heterosexual friends. But this is good. If nothing else there is value here, great value, in remembering that most folks outside the gay community are in the dark about the details of our struggle and its history.

That isn’t because they’re ignorant (at least My friends aren’t!), it’s because their news streams generally don’t give much focus to our lives and our issues. This fact really hits home day after day lately, as I engage other friends, heterosexuals, and see them getting genuinely surprised to hear details about Chick Fil A’s corporate giving to hate groups…even more surprised at the magnitude of venom those hate groups have been injecting into the political discourse for years. On the one hand, it can get frustrating to be constantly reminded in these conversations that we are mostly a side show to the other pressing issues most heterosexuals face. Like oh…the crappy economy…their job situations…their health care. On the other hand, the “teachable moment” here runs both ways.

Just because you can recite off the top of your head what states have same-sex marriage and what states have it on the ballot this year and who the major players are in the fight against it and where they get their money from, that doesn’t mean everyone else can, and just because they can’t that doesn’t mean they don’t care. Harder, but just as important to learn is this: just because you hear some boilerplate crap about same-sex marriage and gay rights in general coming out of their mouths that doesn’t mean anything, other then the hate mongers are much better at getting these little poisonous memes out there then our crappy corporate news media is at informing people.

So…keep calm, and carry on a discussion with whoever is willing to listen. Remember…they don’t always know the subject the way we do.

Below is something I just posted elsewhere, in the hope that clues are digested here and there. It began with an old high school classmate, also an atheist but let it be said with a much Much bigger chip on his shoulder toward religion then I’ve got, who surprised me by dispensing some standard antigay boilerplate crap to the effect that:

• Heterosexual relationships are of a different kind because they have the potential to procreate. (He actually said he was surprised the “religionists” didn’t make more of an issue about biology! (foolish religionists…always waving your bibles when there is Biology to discuss!))
• Government needs to put same-sex couples into a different category to distinguish between families that procreate for the purposes of education, housing, transportation, etc…

And oh by the way he’s fine with a Constitutional Amendment granting all the same rights heterosexual couples have to same-sex couples.   Just not apparently, the term “marriage”

Here’s my reply…

So you’re fine with government denying the status of marriage to opposite sex couples who are infertile for one reason or another (old age or medical condition) but allowing them some sort of separate but equal status? Even if they’ve adopted children anyway? Somehow I am doubting that.

I can see you don’t follow the struggle between gay Americans and the religionists much (and as I said before I don’t expect everyone to) because the fact is that’s actually something they bellyache about a Lot. Along with something they keep calling the “complementary nature of man and woman.”

I can appreciate how, being sexually drawn to the opposite sex, and finding a wholeness of body and soul, a perfect romantic complement in a person of the opposite sex, heterosexuals can mistake that complementary nature of their relationships for gender. Listen to your gay neighbors: it isn’t gender. The complement is the person. If you look at human relationships you see it all the time; lovers filling in each other’s blank spaces. The religionists are always claiming that homosexual relationships don’t really involve love as deeply or as meaningfully as heterosexual relationships, but all that is telling is that they can’t see the people for the homosexuals. But also that they aren’t looking too carefully at themselves. If making babies makes a marriage then why do so many children live apart from one or both parents? How often do you hear the story of a guy getting his girlfriend pregnant and then leaving her. Some relationship that, eh?

Children do not make a marriage work. They will not turn a sexual relationship into a whole hearted romantic one capable of sustaining a marriage. That I even have to say this given the barrage of evidence all around us is just…amazing. But that is what the national conversation about the rights of gay people reliably devolves into. If having sex does not make a marriage, as the religionists keep yapping at gay people, then sex that results in children clearly does not either. The evidence is all around us. That takes something more. And if you would bother to look you might see that your gay neighbors are as capable of that something more as anyone else is.

I would put it to you that this something more is something that any civilized society should want to nurture in its people. Or at minimum, not try to suffocate.

Our relationships are not of a different kind. They are just a small variation on a theme. And that holds true for same sex marrieds, same sex dating but not sure want to marry and one night stands. Try your local straight singles bar sometime to see a lot of that. Or here in Baltimore, where we have a charming little neighborhood called The Block. Browse around it sometime and then tell me that heterosexual relationships are so much more innately noble. Cheap? Empty? Oh boy! It isn’t just chicken that’s on the junk food menu. There’s a lot of sex on that menu too it would seem.

And don’t gay people make really swell scapegoats for all the problems heterosexuals are having with their lives these days? Oh gosh…if we can only reserve the word “marriage” for ourselves, keep it out of the hands of Teh Gay, then we won’t have such high rates of divorce, or so many lost children wondering where mom or dad or both went. No…I don’t think kicking your gay neighbors into a separate but equal status is going to help with any of that.

Our relationships are not in any substantive way any different from that of heterosexuals. And the reason government needs to stop denying same sex couples access to marriage is that equal justice thing. Government does not need to keep tabs on whether a couple is gay or straight for education, housing healthcare or any of that, just do they have kids. I believe the census already asks about that. No. The only reason to place a different label on our relationships would be to enforce some sort of cultural norm that has no bearing at all on anything real, other then a deeply rooted need to see our relationships as somehow different. Separate. Apart.

Why would anyone want to do that?

So you know…I use the term “religionist” in the above because that was how my classmate from way back when referred to them. That is not how I would normally put it, nor do I believe that religion is necessarily a problem for gay people. Or anyone for that matter. You hear a lot of bible waving from homophobes, but that doesn’t mean they’re very religious…only that they’ve discovered their bibles have another handy use besides door stop and beer coaster.

When it comes to matters of religion and faith I keep coming back to something the author Mary Renault once said, that politics, like sex, is a reflection of the person within, and that if a person is mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in their politics and it will come out in their sex lives when what really matters is they aren’t the sort of person who behaves like that. I would only add religion to that statement. If they are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in their spiritual lives when what really matters is they aren’t the sort of person who behaves like that.

I know a lot of religious people will profoundly disagree with that because what I’m saying there basically is religion does not matter, what matters is the person within, but it’s been my experience in life. If you are an angry person, you probably worship an angry god (or I suppose, just angry at existence if a non-believer). I have never seen a religious epiphany make a cold heart warm, but I have seen it bring to life a tiny little spark of humanity that was always there, but buried under a lot of hurt. There are people who hurt and who lash out in pain. And there are cold hearts out there that will never know a touch of human warmth. That is not the fault of their religion.