Monday Meditation

How the legalization of same sex marriage has negatively impacted my life:

My dad is gay and has a serious boyfriend whom he moved from Albuquerque to Austin to live with. That's not the negative part. That didn't happen just the other day or anything. But the boyfriend has a six-year-old daughter from a previous partnership and my five-year-old daughter is already jealous that this little stranger girl is living with her grandpa when she only gets to see her grandpa a couple of times a year. She is worried my dad is going to love this little stranger girl more than he loves his granddaughter. And if my dad and his boyfriend get married, which it sounds like they plan to do, then this "problem" with family definition will be exacerbated for my daughter. 'Tis life, I tell myself. There can definitely be worse things going on in our family, but not in my daughter's eyes.

And since the marriage equality movement, I've had to deal with my born-again Christian aunt's Facebook posts about how God has abandoned America, and shared pictures from weird pages she follows of gay people looking like devils and stuff like that. Obviously this is disrespectful to me, my dad, and my brother (and her own grown children who accept that their uncle is gay); but it's also funny in an enraging way because my aunt was married to a pedophile for forever and didn't even divorce him until five years after accusations against him were proven to be true. Instead, she ended up divorcing him because he cheated on her. Because having sex with a consenting woman is far worse than doing sexual things to a child? Even if it had been a man her husband had cheated with, that still does not give her the right to gay bash on Facebook under the guise of "just saying" and "just my opinion." Homosexuality is not what ruined her marriage or her life.