And hi. I’m delurking. I’ve been reading your blog for some time now. I suppose this was the thorn that finally stuck me in the ass and prompted me to say hello. So… hello!

It often feels like bashing the proverbial cranium against a brick wall conversing with someone who is philisophically opposed to same-sex parenting.

I don’t know what it takes to change minds….

J

I watched it, and thought it was terribly sad. How difficult it must be to go through life determined to keep your mind and heart closed to anything that goes against what you “know” is right. Throughout the hour, you could see Kati struggling to reconcile her beliefs with what she was seeing in front of her. Time and again, she chose to retreat into her cozy little beliefs rather than face a new truth.

The only part that really made me mad was her absolute refusal to understand why her beliefs and actions are offensive to others. One of the dads did, I thought, a good job of explaining why he has no problem with her thoughts, but a big problem when those thoughts became actions that threatened his family, but she simply refused to understand. Normally, I’d give someone a lot of credit for at least trying to live outside of his/her comfort zone, but here it seemed that Kati went on this show only to prove that she couldn’t be moved, even by compelling evidence and arguments. Why did she even bother?

My partner and I live near a wonderfully liberal metropolis. Cost of living, however, puts us in a somewhat-conservative-but-really-more-white-trash-than-we-care-to-admit suburb. It also puts us closer to “the enemy,” a shadowy idea of a person we have yet to meet. Sadly, Kati puts a face to that person.

Given our less-than-liberal surroundings, we sometimes overcompensate, trying to prove what stunning parents/neighbors/community members we are. Who brings two full plates of artfully arranged veggies to snack at school? We do. Who’s that working really hard to make our low budget yard look as nice as the landscaped one next door? My partner. Who plans to be the world’s most annoying helpful PTA mom? That would be me.

What do we hope to achieve through this overcompensation? We want people to accept our family. We want Kiddo to have a positive school experience, hopefully free of teasing that might stem from having gay moms. We want our gayness to be a non-issue, even if that means we’ll get lumped in with all the other boring suburbanites.

But then there are people like Kati. Who don’t care how well we raise our kids or keep our lawns. Who believe at their core that our gayness trumps anything else. Who want to limit our rights to adopt and/or co-parent our children.

Watching the show, I did feel compassion for Kati. She worried that she wouldn’t be able to hold on to her convictions when surrounded by people who think differently. She felt isolated and attacked. It clearly caused her turmoil, meeting admirable people who didn’t fit her preconceived notions.

I was sad about how the show ended. I hoped that she would have seen the light, if you will. But she didn’t.

I was reminded of an Amy Ray lyric, “Tolerance it ain’t acceptance. I know you want it to be, when you’re out of Laramie.”

I think she became upset so often when she was explaining her beliefs because she was experiencing cognitive dissonance. You can’t say, “I’m okay with you, but I think you’re morally repugnant” to someone’s face and not expect to feel weird about that unless you’re a sociopath. The fact that she got upset showed that she was processing this, even if the processing didn’t get very far in the 30 days.

She’ll probably never truly understand what a hatemonger she is. It became clear when she was talking to the lesbian moms that she thinks homosexuality is a choice. Personally, I don’t understand this type of thinking; or rather, even if it were a choice, it’s okay by me. So it’s hard for me to see her point of view.

I think Tom (?) got to the heart of the matter when he told Kati that it was one thing for her to have these feelings, but another to act upon them to work for legislation that would prevent gay and lesbian couples from adopting. That is just straight up legislated hate, and it was so frustrating how she couldn’t understand that.

My feelings about the attitudes of the woman on the show (who, I’m sure, wouldn’t approve of SMC either) go further than the fact that my kid’s dad is gay. We will have an unusual arrangement (although, I think most known donor situations are unique). I will be the sole custodial parent and my friend will not be responsible for support, but we are creating a family. My friend (and his extended family) will be involved in our child’s life, but I will be responsible for all decisions. When we started talking about our arrangement, I did some thinking about how I would feel in his shoes, and the one thing that struck me was, what if something happened to me. So I told him that I felt he deserved an equal say regarding that. That we should be in agreement about custody of the child if something were to happen to me. I was relieved when he told me recently that he discussed this with his partner and that they would want custody under those circumstances. (My family’s nuts, they’re not getting custody!)

If this works (we start in a couple of weeks), my child will have so much love in his/her life! Nothing “wrong” or “sinful” in that!