I don’t have a clue what your future holds.

 

Will you be a lawyer, successful with a busy life full of friends, family and career?

 

Will you be a stay at home mom, spending your days wiping noses, driving to and from softball games and gymnastic lessons?

 

Will you be a bleeding heart liberal?  Will you spend your time actively working to better life for people around you?

 

Will you be a conservative Christian, who thinks government should stay out of private lives and private sector?

 

I don’t know what paths you will take.  I have no idea what roads you will travel, or what adversity you will face.

 

I don’t know if one day you will come to me and tell me that you don’t like boys, you like girls.

 

What I do know is that it doesn’t matter.  I will love you no matter who you love.

 

Except it does matter.  It matters because ignorance and bigotry still exists in such ugly fashion at the time I am writing this.

 

Because some people still believe it is ok to take away the rights of people who lead different lives than their own.

 

Less than a hundred years ago we were having these same discussions.  Except then it was about white people thinking that black folks weren’t entitled to the same rights.  Marriage, the ability to vote, to shop in the same stores, eat at the same table, be taught in the same schools.

 

For my generation, it’s absurd to even think about.  Of course the color of your skin doesn’t matter.  Below the surface we are all the same.  To misquote some Shakespeare,  “Prick us, do we not bleed?”

 

To be honest, we still haven’t gotten past all of the bigotry towards black people.  The fact that the KKK still exists, and other, hate-filled groups like them, is evidence of that.

But it’s not legal to tell black people they can’t have our rights.  Hatred doesn’t just disappear stealthily into the night.  It finds new targets.

 

I hope by the time you are old enough to read and understand this, you too will be appalled that we ever had to even have these discussions.  That they were wrapped up in religion and God and Jesus as excuses to justify the bigotry.  People cherry picking Bible passages to further their own agenda, all the while ignoring the fact that we have a separation of church and state in this country and laws cannot and should not be biblically based.  Let’s not even get into the fact that the Bible is full of things that were perfectly acceptable then that we find abhorrent today:  slavery, stoning, selling of women as chattel, polygamy, etc.

 

Whether Jesus would have approved of homosexuality is irrelevant.   He sat and dined, at his invitation with the worst of his era’s society.  He preached love and tolerance.  He did not preach hate and exclusion. All humans are worthy of God’s love. All.  Not a select few.

 

Allowing gay people to marry, in civil unions and state sanctioned marriages in no way undermines or weakens marriage between two heterosexuals.  Men and women will still marry and divorce, I might add, at the same alarming rate as always.

 

No, I don’t believe churches should be forced to perform the ceremonies.  Again, we are circling around back to that separation of church and state people seem to conveniently forget when pushing their own agenda.

 

I got married in chapel.  By a man licensed by the state of Nevada to perform the ceremony.  Six years later a judge signed some papers and it was all over.

 

Who the hell am I, or anyone else, to say that this right is only for a select few?

 

So, my dear Ava, I don’t know if you will marry a woman, a man, or not marry at all.

 

What I do know, is that I want the choice to be yours, and not someone else’s.