In a Blue State of Mind

It's very easy, when one surrounds oneself with people of a like mind, to begin to believe that the whole world thinks that way. Or at least you can forget for considerable periods of time that there are numerous souls out there who disagree with you, who have a very different slant on life. Specifically, in the blue state bubble where I choose to live my life, it is very easy to believe that the world has changed and society as a whole is much more accepting of differences than it once was.

Alas, it is not so. A couple of days ago, I walked into the main office at the school where I work and two older women (That is to say that they are about my age, 50 something.) were talking to a twenty-something female teacher about why she and her long-time boyfriend had not gotten married yet. Now I know the teacher in question and I have known for some time that she and her boyfriend live together (I believe cohabitate is the term.) and have bought a house together and have a stable relationship. Perhaps I was a little oblivious, but it never occurred to me that anyone would have an issue with this. It's so normal. So I blithely jumped into the conversation, "How long have you and your boyfriend been living together anyway?"

I thought everyone knew the facts. Not! The two older women were taken aback. One jerked her head around to the young woman and said, "Is this true?" The other woman of the older persuasion said, "I guess you and I live in a different world." An unstated "Tsk! Tsk!" hung in the air. I knew I had screwed up and mentioned something that I shouldn't have, but in my world it was not an issue and I forgot for a moment that there are still cultural conservatives lurking everywhere. I felt it necessary, being an old guy, to let them know that my wife and I lived together for quite some time before we finally got married, and more than anything else, it just made life easier, from a family standpoint, and for tax and legal purposes. We had always been committed to each other, married or not.

I live in the middle of a major city. I have friends who are black, white, various kinds of Latino, immigrants from Europe, immigrants from Africa, immigrants from Asia, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, those without religion at all, gay and lesbian, and just about variety of humanity. A great many friends who I have known over the years live together for the long haul without getting married. I have gay friends who have chosen to get married. I have both gay and lesbian friends who raise children in non-traditional settings with perfectly normal and acceptable results. This is my state of normalcy.

Bearing all of that in mind, it is just absolutely mind-boggling that a Justice of the Peace in Tangipahoa Parish in Southeastern Louisiana (Hammond, Louisiana or somewhere thereabouts) refused to perform a marriage for an inter-racial couple because he said that he had reservations about the hard life that children of such a marriage would have. Is this real? In 2009? I believe the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed such outrageous practices somewhere in the last century. I find it unconscionable that most states do not recognize gay marriages or civil unions, for reasons so numerous that it would take an entire post just to go into that, and yet there are still cultural conservatives who think an African-American and a white person of European ancestry should be prevented from marrying. And yet those people think that they have a personal mandate to prevent this from happening. Oh, and the Pope still doesn't believe in birth control either.

What planet are these people from? What century do they think they're living in? Some of their beliefs are narrow-minded, racist, destructive, and stupid. Some are just narrow-minded, destructive, and stupid. I suppose a lot of one's beliefs and actions spring from the paradigm within which they operate. Well this is 2009 and the predominant paradigm for survival and successful navigation of the next century is a lot closer to that of the blue state liberal than of the red state cultural conservative. Those attitudes that are the least accepting of ways of life that are not like one's own, that are judgmental and punitive of those ways of life not like one's own, these are the attitudes that divide a society, that are destructive of people's lives, that do not allow us as a society to progress.

Now, if you'll excuse me, Liberal Man has a date at the Interracial Gay Atheists Cohabitation and Child Rearing Society. I believe he is the guest speaker and I wouldn't miss this for the world. All of my closest friends will be there. I may have to bring my guitar. I'm in a blue, blue state of mind........