A short note on Gay Supreme Court Week. Story about my friend Mark.
Mark is homosexual. Not flamboyant. But you'd probably guess. And a hairdresser, for those of you counting clichés. Four months ago, a few days after Hurricane Sandy blew through our neighborhood like the Fifth Horseman, destroying homes, beaches, roads, and lives, Mark's brother was in his yard. His house had been flooded out, ruined, but Mark's brother felt that he should probably do something about the 80-foot-tall oak that had been partially uprooted by the storm and wobbled precariously over the property.
Mark's brother climbed down into the hole at the base of the tree and began cutting its roots. When he severed one too many of the roots the trunk of the tree snapped back into place. The tonnage crushed Mark's brother. Still alive, his head and shoulders above ground, screaming for help. Neighbors rushed to the site and tried digging him out with shovels. To no avail. Mark's brother died the next day. Mark immediately took his devastated sister-i n-law and her children into his home. They have lived together since. Relied on him. Loved him as he loves them.
"I was always the kids' favorite uncle," Mark told me yesterday over a drink. "The nephews and my niece, my two godchildren--I was their mother's labor coach--they called me ‘Mean Uncle Mark' when I babysat, which was a lot. Because I didn't take any crap. But it was, you know, affectionate. They always knew that they were safe with me. If they needed to talk to somebody about something, a problem, they knew that they could talk to me.
"I never came out to them--who would do that to children?--but I'm pretty certain that when they were old enough to know what gay means, they understood I was gay. Of course my family did."
Which brings me to the past few days. The robed Supremes listening to the legal arguments defending both California's Proposition 8--banning same-sex marriage--as well as the supporters of the ill-conceived Defense of Marriage Act. Both arguments were constructed upon saving our children from the queers.
The lawyer Charles Cooper, Prop 8's defender, could not come right out and tell the court the truth--that his entire case rests on the supposition that the people he represents don't like homos and are repelled by the thought of two men having sex. (Two women, not so much.) So instead he couched his argument in the nebulous "won't someone think of the children" defense, which was old when the Simpsons used it two decades ago.
'Real-world consequences'
"Redefining marriage will have real-world consequences," Cooper told the court, referring naturally to those consequences' effects on our kids. "It is impossible for anyone to foresee the future accurately enough to know what those real-world consequences would be. And among those real-world consequences, your Honor, we would suggest, are adverse consequences."
Such as, one of the Justices asked? Cooper could not say.
Similarly, a bigshot Republican National Committeeman from Michigan used the occasion of the court's hearings on Prop 8 and DOMA to post on his Facebook page a screed from an alleged medical doctor positing the threats posed to children by public schools teaching that homosexuality is an accepted alternative life style. Specifically, that "part of the homosexual agenda is to get the public to affirm their filthy lifestyle," and that, "homosexuals account for half the murders in large cities."
It is to laugh.
I do not know much about California's 40,000 children of same-sex marriages. Nor am I competent to argue about the individual children of Michigan forced against their will, per this unfortunate medical doctor, to learn about "filthy" homosexuality in their public schools. Instead, in the far term I can only rely on the reams of evidence provided by medical and psychological experts and social workers who call bullshit on that trope.
In the near term, however, I can rely on the example set by my friend Mark, and the emotional and psychological comfort he has extended to his brother's family.
Mark tells me he has only been "parenthetically" following Gay Supreme Court week. "No matter what they rule, some people are never going to change their attitude about homosexuality." He shrugs, tells me about a job he once had as the dog handler for a traveling company of the "The Wiz." "Gay white guy on a bus full of black actors and musician s touring the Deep South. Handle that, handle whatever the Surpreme Court rules.
"I guess I just hope whatever happens, I don't want kids to have a weird idea of what gays are."
Mark was reluctant to have his story published in Men's Health. He feels that what he has done in his life with his brother's family is merely the act of a good man. Any good man, he says, would have done the same. But listening to the thinly-disguised hate spewed before the Supreme Court this week, and knowing Mark as I do, it struck me that his story should indeed be told.
As regular readers may correctly infer, I have little use for organized religion. But I think this Easter Weekend it might be appropriate to recall, perhaps recite, Proverbs 22:6. "Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not turn from it."
I can only hope that I am capable of training my son with the same l oving and compassionate family values that my friend Mark possesses.
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