Family Matters
Find the ice cream
Ten days ago I stepped through the front door of my mother-in-law Jeanette's home for the very first time. She only uses it for ventilation. I have been walking through the smoky back porch door of her little white house in East Helena, Montana, though, since at least Christmas of 1999.
I have been married to her son for coming up on 25 years, depending on how you count the anniversaries. Which gets a bit complicated for us older homos, as we have only been allowed to legally "marry" since SCOTUS decided Obergefell v Hodges in 2015. So, do we count years from the day we met? The day we moved in together? The day we catered a dinner party for 107, publicly pledged to grow our lives around each other, and signed reciprocal wills because that was all we could do at that time to legally bind our commitment? Or, do we just count the years since Oregon allowed us to become "domestic partners" eight years later? We had to wait eight years before we could be "domesticated," which meant less rights but the same duration as the average American marriage until divorce1. As is, our legal marriage — as in the full State and Federal "Marriage, with a capital M" with all the legal bells and whistles, including reciprocal recognition across all 50 states - happened still another eight years after that, in 2016, after SCOTUS decided that same-sex couples, including those who had already considered themselves married for sixteen years, should be allowed the hundreds of legal rights and benefits opposite-sex couples take for granted after ten hot minutes in a Las Vegas chapel. At least for now.
Who knows how long our marriage "rights" will last, though, or theirs for that matter. Donald Trump's Supreme Court ignored 49 years of settled law to draw a fat orange line through Roe v Wade. Which is important to think about, since more fat orange lines may happen. Still, my husband and I considered ourselves married long before the dominators offered us their permission, and we will continue to be married in the ways which matter most if they take their offer back. Homos know we have political targets on our back. We watch the news from Hungary and Russia. People still make bank keeping us homos defined as bold-print warnings in their endless fundraising emails. Many buy what they are being sold. So-called "rights" are ephemeral things. They only exist to the extent others respect and enforce them. Otherwise they're just lines on paper.
It won't matter either way to Jeanette, though. She was for us from the beginning. I got her approval long ago. I may have annoying big city views sometimes, but she was present for our wedding back in 2000, and gave us her blessing. Even though that meant sitting near her ex-husband who abandoned his own family thirty years earlier. He showed up, too. All four of our parents were with us. Mine were older than his grandparents. They all loved their two sons enough to be happy for us. Our marriage is lasting longer than most, by far.
None of which is to say any of our four parents would be picked out of a crowd as gay marriage supporters. None of them are (or were, in my case) the rainbows and unicorns type. Their overall politics would not win many friends in SF, Portland, Brooklyn, Asheville, or Austin. Michael's parents would have been "working-class Democrats" back in the 1970s. My own would have been "Eisenhower Republicans" once their Roosevelt years were done. Meaning all four leaned towards the now-shrunken political center.
Which in turn means all four of them would be written off by most 21st century progressive Democrats as right-wingers of some flavor or another. They would also be written off as RINOs by Trumpy Republicans. Because that's what Americans do right now. We draw lines through people, then post memes and photos of our latest-drawn lines online, assuming agreement and canceling divergence. Scaffolding our preferred consensus. We tend to do whatever it takes to wedge the Overton Window2 of our well-curated "friend" lists open just that much farther in whichever direction we prefer. Division is sexy. Division gets likes. Starkly stated division draws attention from the audiences algorithmically pre-sorted to potentially like us, delivering eyeballs for advertisers and addictively intermittent dopamine for our nervous systems.
All of which behavior stumbles its way along until local society and the social contract cracks. Until friends urge friends to stop talking to our families. To stop speaking to our other friends. To isolate behind screens, clicking out our purities and preferences. To feed the machines ever more data for micro-targeting the next meme or reel they bet we will stop for on our scroll. To go buy guns and stock our basements with preserved food and toilet paper. To give it all up and roast popcorn for the apocalypse.
None of which will matter to Jeanette. She can barely use text and email, and leaves her TV on for background company. Which is how I keep tabs on the local political ads. Michael and I haven't watched broadcast TV in decades. Jeanette and I argue about politics sometimes, enough to just avoid some topics now, after a doozy or two we had during Covid. We also still make each other dinner. We even give each other a good hug once the ice cream bowls are set away and it's time to go home. We do not have to agree on everything to love each other. I just wish she would stop smoking. And, that ain't gonna happen.
About half of all American end in divorce, and last an average of eight years before that happens.
https://www.brides.com/how-long-do-average-u-s-marriages-last-4590261
The term "Overton Window" refers to the current range of politically permissible public debate. Stretching its bounds further and further towards various extremes, for the sake of adjusting the location of its center, is the goal of much modern political rhetoric. This fringe-stretching technique is how most of the traditionally Democrat working-class turned Republican over the past 40 years since Reagan, through ongoing positional changes by both major parties.
Remember when baby Bush was the worst thing that happened to us? Well, I stand before you, a 2000 (I think?) FL Nader voter. I lost friends over that. I was young and passionate about the goals of the Green Party and the importance of breaking the two party system. I was naive and brave. I can say, the friends I lost never really knew me or they wouldn't have been surprised. In today's political climate, with so much on the line, even if AOC herself was running as an independent, I think I'd shed a tear for that passionate young girl, swallow my bile, and vote for the pro-genocide, octogenarian with the better shot at beating He Who Wants to End Democracy.