The good old days- they were terrible!

Some of the opposition to gay marriage seems to boil down to "well, that's not the America I know."  So?  "One man and one woman is the way things are supposed to be, because that's how I (or my parents) lived."  That's not America, though.  Those feelings aren't American or patriotic.  They're false nostalgia.  They're ridiculously self-centered and ignorant.  And they show a deep lack of understanding of history.

Racial intermarriage used to be illegal.  (I'll probably do a post on that someday.)  When I started dating a black woman, a few people said to me "that's not the way I was brought up."  I don't care if you were brought up by wolves; I was brought up to respect people, whatever their color, or whether they had a disability or a strange name, whatever.  I was brought up to respect the principles of America.  Not just the traditions, because some of those aren't that great.  Hatred, discrimination, exclusion... Good old American values, right? We're not perfect, and we never have been.  But do we uphold those "traditions?"  Or do we honor the principles we were founded on?

What does America stand for?  Imposing your ideas on others?  Denying people their rights to begin with?  Maybe you think that, but there's a group of people who would disagree with you, called the Founders.  They might never have imagined gay marriage, but there are lots of things they couldn't have imagined, which we take for granted: the internet, cars, planes, a black president.  Some things we do now might have shocked them, but they were good enough and smart enough that they would have come to terms with things.  I bet Thomas Jefferson would sit down and think about it, and decide that it was fair.

I think many conservatives have a shallow view of history, of tradition, of the Constitution. They want them to mean what they want, but they don't think hard about them, and don't put them in context.  I'm going to go ahead and say it: What it comes down to is, they don't like America.  Don't like freedom (well, they love it for themselves, but don't want to share it.)  They wish for something that never was.  They want to return to that false past, and don't like the present.

Maybe they're dreaming of the '50s, which I guess was a paradise for them or their parents.  Don't expect me to live in your rose-colored version of the past.  If you want to, then by all means do.  Just know that it's not real and never was.  The '50s, if that's what you're remembering, weren't idyllic.  100 or 200 years ago, things weren't perfect either.  Your vision of the past isn't always what it was actually like.  And even if it's accurate, that doesn't mean we should go back there.

I have a theory: most people think their childhood era was ideal.  Well, it wasn't always.  And even if it was, it's a very small slice of the real world, and can't be applied to everything and everybody.  Open your eyes.  Tradition is what you grew up with.  What was true in the '50s is not true now, and might not have been true 100 years ago.  Get over it.  You have a selective memory; you're wearing rose-colored glasses.  Or purposely whitewashing the past.

I'm a history buff, and sometimes I'm asked what era I would like to live in.  Certainly there have been interesting times in the past, and it'd be cool to go back for a bit and see things, experience things.  But there were uncomfortable, unpleasant, and just horrible things about every era too.  I'm happy in the present, and looking forward to the future.  I hope we remember the past, and learn from it, and move forward into the future, with liberty and justice for all.


-----This entry's title is stolen from a book------