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<\/a><\/p>\nI grew up in Miami in the 1970s.<\/p>\n
Those were the years when a woman named Anita Bryant led an attack on gay rights in my hometown.<\/p>\n
Back then\u00a0homophobic bigots like her were not condemned. Civic leaders, respected broadcasters, clergy from liberal denominations all heeded her cry to \u201csave the children.\u201d<\/p>\n
I was one of those children. She didn\u2019t save me.<\/p>\n
Instead, what she and the narrow-minded, ignorant and unthinking people who followed her did was to consign me and others like me to an adolescence and young adulthood of shame and self-loathing.<\/p>\n
Like many others, I overcame that.<\/p>\n
In the late 1990s I left\u00a0the closet.<\/p>\n
In 2009 I traveled to Montreal to marry my partner \u2026 my HUSBAND.<\/p>\n
And on June 26, 2015 the nation that calls itself the \u201cland of the free\u201d recognized the dignity of our\u00a0lives, our relationships, and those of millions of other people like us.<\/p>\n
We did not suffer alone. We had our families. We had each other. We had a growing number of supporters.<\/p>\n
We all have people\u00a0to thank.<\/p>\n
I want to acknowledge and thank my dear daughters, the only results of my closeted life that I celebrate each and every day. They have stood by their daddy all the way.<\/p>\n
I want to tell my dear HUSBAND, Arthur, just how much I love him. We have taken this journey together, repeatedly committing to each other from\u00a0a series of domestic partnerships to our Canadian wedding and right down to this magnificent day.<\/p>\n
And finally, I want to thank the millions of people who opened their minds and hearts to the true meaning of love. Many were once among the ignorant and unthinking, but they dug deep inside themselves to discover that they possessed the extraordinary capacity to change. This is one of the greatest possibilites\u00a0of being human. And, as a result,\u00a0our nation has been changed for the better.<\/p>\n
To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: The moral arc of the human condition\u00a0is long, but at times it really does bend toward justice. This is one of those times.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I grew up in Miami in the 1970s. Those were the years when a woman named Anita Bryant led an attack on gay rights in my hometown. Back then\u00a0homophobic bigots like her were not condemned. Civic leaders, respected broadcasters, clergy from liberal denominations all heeded her cry to \u201csave the children.\u201d I was one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2281,"featured_media":2740,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[16,27,33],"class_list":["post-2739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogentries","tag-homophobia","tag-morality","tag-politics"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a><\/p>\n