My Time as Two Pink Rectangles

If you’re on Facebook, you know there are happenings in the Supreme court this week.  You know it because chances are at least a handful of your friends have replaced their smiling faces with little equals signs, and you may feel that there’s an invasion of the Borg and you’re about to be assimilated.  (Or the Daleks, or the Vampires, depending on what fandom you’re familiar with.)  I have to say I’ve taken it all in with mixed emotions.  Like many of my friends, right now I’m also a pink equal sign.  I did it to show my friends that I support them, because while their sexuality leaves them inextricably marked I myself have happily been able to be “normal”.  I don’t think it’s too much to ask that for one week I be as marked as many of my friends feel, and for one week I’m open to judgment and “what the heck is that profile photo about” and whatever, as a simple expression of love.   I love my gay friends, and I know how much it means for them to see their Facebook pages painted pink and red.  No matter how alone they may feel when they and their partners get sideways glances in shopping markets and face blasts of hate from the evening news, for this one week they don’t feel so alone.

But even in the happy solidarity of equal signs flying back and forth on Facebook, and for one blissful minute feeling the togetherness of all of our names sharing the same face, there is something in it all that turns my stomach.  Not the love, not the togetherness, but the fact that it’s contrived by a unique set of circumstances.  Some day, maybe tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day, we’ll all go back to being ourselves.

This tenuous feeling of togetherness, of shared love and shared rejection, of spreading the hurt across a thousand faces that for one moment choose to share the same mask; this tenuous thread will break, and I’ll go back to being just another face in the crowd. But my friends?  They’ll still be holding hands with their lovers in the grocery store.

Let me tell you a story.  Last night, I was commenting on a friend’s page, and one of his friends asked me if we could private message.  I (willingly) subjected myself to a protracted conversation where I was interrogated while this very well-meaning soul tried to catch me in a logic trap to teach me the error of my theology.  I can’t judge the guy, because I’ve been that kind of person myself and I’m sure that people who think that gays are a threat feel the same queasiness that I felt while being subjected to my own Biblical exegesis.  But it made me wonder, what did I do?  What did I do to convince this guy that I needed him to explain salvation to me?  Why does he think that I need to be drilled on faith and works?  Why does he think that I haven’t heard this argument a thousand times before?

Oh, I get it. I’m a pink equality symbol, so I must be broken.  I must need somebody’s help to understand scripture.  But tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that, I won’t be a threat anymore.  I’ll just be a smiling strawberry blonde who disagrees.  I won’t be marked.

You may be wondering where I’m going with this.  That’s okay, I wonder where I’m going with it too.  Here’s the thing:  It’s easy to forget, in the love and solidarity, what it’s all about.  It’s about a world in which people are told, tacitly and constantly, that they are flawed.  Where people who are subjected to judgement and criticism, where well-meaning people feel it’s their moral obligation to offer correction and condemnation at every turn.  A world in which it must at times be hard as Hell to accept the fact that there is a Creator out there who loves and needs you, and wants you to experience His love and blessing.  A world that straight people may or may not be assimilated into.  But we must never, ever, ever forget:  for some people, that world is just life.  I don’t believe at the end of the day that I have a choice in whether or not I choose to align myself with my gay friends, my single mom friends, my pot smoking friends, my Buddhist an Atheist and Agnostic and Just Plain Confused friends.  I don’t feel that it’s optional that when one of them asks me to show solidarity I do it immediately and without thinking.  Why?  Because how can I minister any love to them if I am not willing to be a part of their world.  How could I ever in good conscience ask them to enter MY world, MY faith, MY belief if I am not willing to bring it into theirs?

So, yeah, on Facebook I’m a pink equality sign.  All I can do is hope that in the real world the compassion I feel for the people I rub shoulders worth marks me as clearly as that avatar does.  And for my friends, my dear friends for whom I mark myself:  you are loved.  I don’t want to leave your world.  It’s rocky and engulfed in flames from time to time as the random hateful visitor passes through, but by God you are here.  You are here, and you make it worth every second.