Fuck yes, this, on how we tolerate all kinds of horrors and then are horrified by love and courage because rapes and murders and assaults just confirm our view of the world as a dark and small one, while courage and love make us reconsider how tightly we’ve drawn the circle around the things we’ve chosen to give a shit about.
We have stories about child molesters, murders and all kinds of vicious, barbaric acts of evil committed by heinous criminals on our front page and yet we never receive a call from anyone saying ‘I don’t need my children reading this.’ Never. Ever. However, a story about two women exchanging marriage vows and we get swamped with people worried about their children.
It’s such a dishonest, lazy argument. There is no discernible way that any of the upset is about anybody’s kids. In the first place, unless you’re swanning around your kitchen all OH MY DEAR HEAVENS HERB THE PICTURE IN THE PAPER TODAY NO DON’T LOOK AT IT HONEY DON’T LOOK DIRECTLY AT IT, your kid probably wasn’t looking at the front page all that closely OR READING THE PAPER AT ALL. Once you made a big hairy huffy fucking deal about it, sure, then the kids are going to be confused. Mostly by how they ended up in the womb of such a goddamn ASSHOLE.
And if you really don’t want your kids upset? Here’s a radical goddamn idea: Try not to be such a FUCKSTICK about this stuff. If you don’t want your kids upset, try not being upset with other people breathing. That’s all these women are doing, getting up in the morning and breathing in and out and doing jobs and coming home to one another. One of them has brain cancer. I think your kids’ delicate fucking feelings are about the last thing on her mind. If your kids have questions about gay people, how about answering them along the lines of what my conservative religious so-not-down-with-the-sexual-revolution parents said when I came home from school asking what the word “faggot” meant: Some people are gay and that’s their business.
I hear all day long about how having children is the best goddamn thing ever, about how it opens your eyes to the world in all these new and fantastic ways and whenever I hear shit like this the next thing I learn is that APPARENTLY ONE OF THOSE WAYS IS THAT IT MAKES YOU A RAGING BIGOT WITH A HARD-ON FOR THE 1860s AND NO ABILITY TO THINK CRITICALLY ANYMORE. God Almighty, have an opinion. Think about the stuff that comes out of your mouth on a daily basis. THINK about the life you’re living. YOUR life, not the life somebody’s living in a stupid sitcom. Don’t fall back on this stupid fucking shorthand with this carping about the kids.
You wanna be a bigot with nothing better to do than call the paper and bitch? GO BE THAT THEN. Quit blaming your goddamn kids. Not only did THEY not do anything to you to deserve your shitty life, it’s disrespectful to the many, many brave and decent parents out there who aren’t raising itty bitty Klansmen on purpose. Plenty of parents manage to not make their kids banging jackholes, so to imply that giving birth loads you up with these ideas is just rude to those people who didn’t somehow have their brains sucked out in the maternity ward.
Plus, you think those kids are disturbed NOW? Wait till they grow up, live in the world, and find out their parents are DICKS.
A.
The truth is most conservatives are fear-driven and want their children to be as close-minded and paranoid as they are. They don’t want their children to read about same-sex couples getting married because they know the children will look around them and realize the world didn’t end because Peggy married Sue or Billy married Bob and they might even take it as tacit permission to come out of the closet themselves. Instead, these “conservative” parents would rather their children grow up believing the world is a dangerous and terrible place full of all kinds of bad people who want to hurt them and take away their freedom. Fear enables control.