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I am old enough to remember how civil and and delicately phrased the public discussions were over the anti-miscegenation laws in the Virginia of my youth, and the tut-tutting of the religious over the ungodly mongrels that came from such sinful unions. I came to Pittsburgh in part because there seemed to be a greater compassion for simple human dignity in the political stands taken by elected officials.

There comes a time when each of us, if we have any moral character, reaches a place from which we cannot back down. I have come to mine.

I can’t accede to the invitation to Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation without protest. He has called the relationship I have had for a decade and a half the equivalent of the crime of pedophilia. I have shared my life with someone; shared the final illnesses and deaths of parents; endured the taunts of neighbors old and young; looked into the eyes of this person as we realized together that we could not stay in our home as we cleaned up the stones that had been thrown at our windows in our nice, Democratic Pittsburgh neighborhood because of who we are.

More and more the work of medical scientists (remember them? they brought us the Polio vaccine and stuff like that) has shown that our orientation is innately given to us. I know my heart was given its compass by my Creator, and it is time for me to stand and say that the One who made me and those near and dear to me did not make garbage-- or mere political fodder-- just because the handiwork differs from the usual product.

We have always been the ones on the fragile fringes, clinging together as time and again our interests were sold out “for the greater good”. There is a legend that the Stonewall riots were started when a drag queen, grieving over the death of Judy Garland, refused that one last time to be roughed up, humiliated and shoved into a paddy wagon—saying through her streaked mascara “I’m not in the mood” as she slugged a New York vice cop. We’ve been kicked around just a little too much lately, and if you think we don’t have the courage of our angry tears, consider a slender man in high heels and a stuffed bra picking a fight with a police squad. To paraphrase e.e. cummings: there is some shit we will not eat.

We are tired of being the meat that gets thrown to the guard dogs so that others can get past the gate. We are God’s children. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, and we are worth more than that.



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