actuallybloggingiguess

[actuallybloggingiguess]

I wish someone would have told me that Gay does not just mean Happy

            I didn’t know what “gay” was until I was way into the teenage years, much less realize the contention surrounding the word in the church. I was raised on classic literature, and to me, gay merely meant happy. There was certainly nothing negative associated with the word. I eventually learned, however, that this was only the case because I had yet to be trained on hating the sin of homosexualty. Perhaps if I’d been taught early on that God can’t handle the sight of two men caring for and taking care of one another, maybe then it would have stuck. If my parents told me that the reason my uncle left his kids’ mother was because he was gay, maybe I would have been angry. But they didn’t. They swept it under the rug, and it was a topic that was not discussed.

               When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the idea of being wealthy. Who wasn’t? So, of course, I would daydream and invent these wonderful ways to spend my money. One of these moments, I remember clearly, I was riding in the car with my mom, describing the lavish lifestyle and immaculate housing I would be living in (using the hospital we were driving past as a reference for size) and all the rooms and play areas I would have for my kids. When finally paused to take a breath, she said gently, “but honey, if you’re working so hard to make all this money, who’s going to take care of your kids?”

           “My wife, of course,” I replied, puzzled and almost a little annoyed that she’d have to ask. Of course my wife would take care of the kids, I would work so she wouldn’t have to. That’s the way things worked.

           “Cierra, you can’t have a wife. You’re a young woman, you’re going to have a husband,” she replied, in her patient educating way. It took me a while to process this. Part of me admonished myself for forgetting the basic rules of life and adulthood that I’d always seen.

           But the other part of me simply asked “why?” Why should a man be able to have a wife, have a career, be in charge? It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, I realized at the time, and I remember feeling a prick of injustice at the thought. It was unreasonable.

           Traditional family values were almost a mantra in my household growing up. Of course I knew what they meant: a father who makes the money, a mother who takes care of the house and children, and children (born of the mother and father) who did their best to learn their upcoming roles. This made sense to me. In most ways. Traditional family values were taught so fiercely that I didn’t think to speculate that maybe there were other options. That the reason we had to fight so hard for them was because they were under attack. No one taught me about this wrong kind of love. No one in the church, that is.

           It wasn’t until my homeschool experience began to come to a close that I began to learn all kinds of things. For example, I learned that the F word was not actually Fip and that teenagers didn’t mind using it, despite knowing perfectly well what it means. I learned that sometimes teasing can be in love. And I learned that some people love other people of the same gender. Well, not just love. Love, like, screw, date, and generally find each other exactly how a woman and man in the traditional sense should find each other. Some of these things took me longer to accept than others.

           For a long time, I took the traditional-family-matters-but-love-is-important-too viewpoint, that all gay people are sinners and guilty of the deepest grievances against God, but we should still love them because he told us to. At the time it seemed perfectly logical to me. Sure, they were wrong. But I love them anyway. Shouldn’t that make them feel good?

          The answer is no. No it shouldn’t, and no it doesn’t. And it wasn’t until I had my own experience with this kind of thinking that I realized just how harmful that mindset can be. And not only for the individual person and the pain that each one of us experiences with coming to terms with ourselves, but it can be deadly if you’re genuinely trying to win people to God. Think about it: someone tells you that because you have brown hair and are allergic to peanuts, their god (the only god, obviously) hates you and thinks you are a bastardization of their design. Despite the fact that they created you with brown hair and a nut allergy. So now you have the people of this god, their representatives, telling you that “hey, you’re a piece of garbage, but we can overlook that!”.

           Not thrilling to hear.

               My mother is a wonderful woman. She is kind and gentle and patient and strong and committed and a mother to anyone who is without. I am blessed beyond measure to have been raised by her and to continue calling her a friend into adulthood. There are great multitude of ways I will raise my children in the way my mother raised me. But I will make a few changes.

               I don’t believe that divorce can be a perfectly acceptable topic, but homosexuality cannot. If you think about it, there is just as much if not more in our Bible about the detriment of divorce than there is about being gay. So why are we all so stoked to jump aboard the “god hates fags” train than we are to pull the plank out of our own eyes?

               I think it’s important that we’re honest with ourselves, and with our children. Lesbian is not a bad word. Bisexuality is valid. Being gay is not a sin. Polyamory is actually biblical. It is not fair to the people we are raising to deprive them of seeing anything other than traditional family values. They will see it eventually. Be immersed in the world. I am not saying that we don’t build filters for our children. Of course we shouldn’t just throw them into our adult worlds of drama right away. But when your daughter has a crush on another girl and would rather kill herself than admit that to you or herself, we have huge problems.