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: Butterflyfish

Thoughts on Gay Marriage I

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***This could be a really long post--and I don't like to write really long posts. So I am going to break it up over several posts, and intersperse other topics in between.***

In the 1990's, when I was in teacher training, the buzz word was tolerance. Teaching tolerance was a huge movement in education. I subscribed to Teaching Tolerance magazine. We were encouraged to make kids aware of different in the experience of various racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. Then kids would tolerate eachother, I guess. Apparently, according to my Contemporary Issues in Education teacher, this involved showing lots of videos with an occasional trip to the local African American Museum.

The word tolerance always fell oddly in my ear, though. Maybe because my mom always used it in the context of something you really didn't want to do but you did because it was the right thing. Like I wasn't allowed to hit my baby sister when she bit me because she was younger and big kids must tolerate little ones without hurting them, even when you wanted nothing more in the world. Or when we went to Aunt Mary's house for christmas, I had to tolerate my horrible mean cousins. These were bitter pills to swallow.

Tolerance to me was a bit like eating Aunt Mary's cooking: at the table, we'd smile and compliment her flavorless lasagna, and on the way home, we'd roundly abuse the meal. I guess for me tolerance has a flavor of feeling one way and acting another.

Tolerance must have different connotations for the folks at Teaching Tolerance, because a Google search revealed that the magazine is going strong, long after my subscription has lapsed. I think they come from a place of teaching empathy, insofar as that can be taught.

Maybe tolerance has a different flavor for Sarah Palin, too. She tolerates gay people. Her actions in Alaska were positive--she allowed same sex benefits for government employees. Maybe she thought she was saying the politically correct thing.

Or maybe it revealed that she, like too many others, will smile when they eat Aunt Mary's lasagna, but feel repulsed inside.

Full post as published by Butterflyfish on November 06, 2008 (boomark / email).