Mar 21, 2008  |  By: Robert A. Bernstein  | COMMENTS     

MY CONVERSION TO gay activism — on behalf of family values, as it were — took place more than 20 years ago. But the experience has taken on new poignancy in light of today’s passionate objections to gay equality on purported moral and religious grounds.

On October 11, 1987 — a date now annually commemorated as National Coming Out Day — I took part in the national gay and lesbian march on Washington. My daughter had come out as lesbian a few months earlier, and since we live in the Washington metro area, her mother (my ex-wife) and I decided to attend, mainly out of curiosity.

We were astonished to find ourselves part of a sea of some 600,000 demonstrators, nestled in a relatively small delegation of about 150 parents. But some of the parents were from as far away as California, Colorado and Washington State, and many carried signs reading, “We love our gay and lesbian children.”

As we began to march, we heard a sort of mysterious rumble that seemed to grow in volume, and we looked at each other with some concern. Then it dawned on us — as the noise reached a crescendo into a resounding roar — that it was in fact a heartfelt ovation for our little band of supportive parents. The deafening din followed us all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue.

We were profoundly touched by the ovation — but even more by the tear-streaked faces of many of those cheering us. Dozens of young men and women rushed out sobbing to hug us and thank us for, in effect, serving as stand-ins for their own, less accepting parents.

IT WAS THAT powerful response, borne of a senseless rending of the young people’s own family ties, that triggered my personal commitment to combating parental ignorance, primarily via participation with PFLAG.

Much has improved for our GLBT kids in the two decades since that day. But the passion of the remaining bigotry seems, if anything, even more heated, stoked primarily by religious fundamentalists who loudly insist that they are the ones protecting the sanctity of the family and of marriage.

I am not a particularly religious person. I grew up in an essentially non-observant Jewish home, and I’m now a member of a Unitarian church, where it is said — not wholly in jest — that our prayers are directed “To Whom It May Concern.” But I wonder how in God’s name, as it were, my own family and my current second marriage of nearly 30 years are somehow “protected” by denying legal rights to my daughter and millions of other innocent citizens.

Indeed, the informal but devoted union of my daughter and her partner of nearly 20 years has already lasted approximately twice as long as the doubly legally blessed marriage of her mother and me, who were married by a Catholic priest and, a few hours later, by a rabbi.

TYPICALLY, COMMON SENSE tells us just the opposite of what many, in the name of religion and family values, would have us believe.

Most disturbing, and tragically ironic, is the fact that the homophobic passion to “protect children” from gay teachers, gay relatives and gay parents ends up in fact creating vast harm to untold numbers of youngsters.

For example, how are the millions (and counting) of children of same-sex parents protected when they hear politicians and religious leaders denounce their parents as deviants out to corrupt them? Or when the Vatican, seat of perhaps the most powerful church in the world, proclaims that their parents are “doing violence” to them? When they read that they are destined to become social and psychological misfits? When they lack adequate health care because they are not covered by the insurance policy of a parent’s life partner? When they face poverty because a parent is ineligible for the survivor benefits of his or her partner? When they might be denied lifesaving treatment because a hospital emergency room refuses to recognize the authority of a partner?

So you’ll excuse my skepticism of those who so loudly claim the mantle of family values in the name of God and the Bible.