Our family knows many same-sex couples – our neighbors in Connecticut,
members of my staff, parents of their schoolmates. Some are now married
because the Connecticut Supreme Court and our state legislature have
made same-sex marriage legal in our state.
But to my daughters, these couples are married simply because they
love each other and want to build a life together. That’s what we’ve
taught them. The things that make those families different from their
own pale in comparison to the commitments that bind those couples
together.
And, really, that’s what marriage should be. It’s about rights and responsibilities and, most of all, love.
Seriously, though, he says something here I think will resonate with a lot of people his age and even my age:
And as many other Americans have realized as they’ve struggled to
reconcile the principle of fairness with the lessons they learned early
in life, that’s not an easy thing to overcome.
But the fact that I was raised a certain way just isn’t a good enough reason to stand in the way of fairness anymore.
Because I wasn’t so much raised to believe that marriage was between a man and a woman — we weren’t so much homophobic in my family as we were untalkative — as that I simply never had to confront the question. As a middle-class straight chick with middle-class straight friends (at least, friends who presented to me and the rest of the Catholic-school-going world as straight) it simply never came up. I feel bad about that now, wondering whose issues I simply ignored because I didn’t know any better, but I don’t think that’s unusual, about anything, really. Not a lot of people consider the lives of others unlike them unless forced to, unless the reality of injustice to someone else is put in their path and they can’t avoid it anymore.
The question then becomes, of course: Knowing, what did you do? Did you shut your eyes and talk about The Lord not liking all the boykissing, or did you look at what was in front of you and take it upon yourself to figure out what was your upbringing and what was your basic humanity? Where did the things you believed smash up against each other, and where did you have to choose: Fairness for all before the law, or the comfort of disdaining the stranger? Having to choose, what choice did you make? Having made a choice, did you speak up about it or did you keep quiet?
And while it will seem crazy to Dodd’s daughters that we questioned this at all, this is how we change, one decision at a time, one choice at a time, one statement at a time.
A.