Earthquakes

If it weren't for the earthquakes, I'd send my daughter to California to go to college and live her life. Because in California, my amazing Anna would be able to marry the girl of her dreams if she wanted to.

I have to admit I never considered myself the marrying kind, and when I did marry at the age of 30 it took some adjusting. Nearly 22 years later, I look back on the adventure and think, why would people want to deny this opportunity to anyone?

I fail to understand how anyone who claims they want to "preserve marriage" thinks that the way to do that is to deny it to people. It defies rational thought that two people who are the same gender can't get married because if they got married then there wouldn't be marriage!? How does that work?

Maybe by the time Anna's old enough (wait till you're at least 25, sweetie!) we will have made some progress. I know I'll keep trying. It's for the children. Like mine.

Family by Fate and by Choice

I come from a large family. I'm the oldest of six - a brother and four sisters. My Aunt Bea, my mother's sister, had ten children. Of all those kids, one turned out gay - one of my cousins, who lives in North Carolina with his partner. Of my siblings, only two of us had children - my brothers' two sons, and my two daughters. One of my daughters is gay.

Why the family history? Because although the vast majority of the marriages and partnerships in this family are heterosexual, we're still an LGBT family. Most families, if you cast the net wide enough to encompass a family reunion, are LGBT families.

Families come in so many permutations, and the one that today's American fundamentalists insist is the only one, isn't. Family is a malleable concept, changing based on the culture, the times, and the human spirit.

As far as I'm concerned, a family exists when the people within it call themselves a family. Whether they're the same gender or not, whether they have children or not, whether they are the same generation or multiple generations, they are family. Let no man cast them asunder.