Protest!!!

Well, I guess our parents’ hippie genes finally kicked in – we took the kids to their first ever protest last night. We made a sign that said ‘California has no room for hate – overturn Prop 8!’ and we got all bundled up and headed over to a huge anti-Proposition 8 rally that was going on near our house at the Sunset Junction. We were very excited about the whole thing. Our friend Michelle came with us and, as an added bonus, Finn’s best friend, Hana and her Mom, Kei showed up at the last minute and they went with us, as well.

At first, everything went great. Patrick and Jack got their picture taken with our sign and Kei was interviewed for some news channel or other. There were LOTS of people there and Jack was excited by the policemen on horses - although I have to admit, their riot gear made me a little nervous. We duly waved our sign around, though and chanted “What do we want? Equality! When do we want it? Now!” with the thousands of other people who were there with us. It was very interesting to be in the heart of the gay community at such a difficult time. There was a certain amount of anger palpable in the air, but there was also a tremendous sense of unity and a few people expressed their gratitude to us and a few of the other heterosexual families nearby who had shown up to support them.

One gay couple near us had blown up their recent marriage certificate and posted it on their signs. That got to me more than anything else and I thought about how I would feel if someone told me that my marriage to Patrick was an affront to God and was going to be invalidated. I told Patrick recently that one of the main reasons why I support gay marriage is because of the feeling I got after we got married. We lived together before we were married and I don’t think either one of us really expected marriage to be all that different, but I was surprised by what a profound feeling I had after our ceremony. That feeling has sustained us many times over the years and I really have a hard time understanding why anyone would want to prevent gay couples from sharing in that same experience.

Anyway, that’s it for my 2 cents about this subject. For the most part, we had a great time at the protest, but things took a bit of a sad turn towards the end when Mr. Jack started to get sick. We could tell he was a little out of sorts, but pretty soon, ‘out of sorts’ turned into a more violent and icky form of protest when he actually started throwing up. Unfortunately, he and Finn have a stomach bug that caused us to cancel Jack’s birthday party that we had scheduled for today. We’re bummed about that, but at least we got a good joke out of the whole thing. We decided that we should have changed our sign to ‘Prop 8 makes me sick!’ Ha! I bet that would have made the evening news.