Darkside Rainbow

First they call us a threat to peace. Then they call us plague rats. Now we have devolved into something more simple, and yet so much more evocative; now we are the most base and vile thing of all, an essence, an embodiment, a raw and filthy thing that resides at humanity’s core.

We are evil, and so is any gay couple who wishes to raise a child.

Supporter of amendment to ban gay marriage says same-sex unions “evil” - Radio Iowa News

A proponent of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in Iowa says legalizing same-sex unions here would be “evil.” Iowa Family Policy Center president Chuck Hurley says children will suffer if gay couples are allowed to marry.

“From our perspective, it is evil to intentionally create a home where a child would be deprived of a mother or of a father. That is an evil act,” Hurley says. “That is a self-centered act that we already know…on average that child is going to do worse than if he or she had a mom and a dad.”

Hurley points to a study published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1993 that found children from broken homes fare far worse in life than those who came from a two-parent home. “I think it’s evil to experiment on children and intentionally…by law create households that don’t have a father or that don’t have a mother,” Hurley says. “Yes, I do believe this is a battle between good and evil.”

So now we are evil and a home without a binary-gender parental system is now a broken one - even if there are two nurturing parents, even if the opposite-sex parent would have been unfit, abusive, and/or dismissive. I don’t think this idiot quite understands the definition of a broken home. I come from a broken home, one that was never whole to begin with. My life began broken, and I bloody well fixed it with little to no help from dysfunctional and somewhat mental parents. A home with two loving, stable parents, regardless of their gender, is not broken - and it is certainly not evil.

I’m going to tell you a story. I’m going to tell you the story of a little boy, and the young man that he called “Daddy” long before he called him “big brother.”

In late 2002, I walked out of my mother’s house and out of her life, after a stormy altercation that had been building in the brief two months after college while I looked for a job in Louisiana’s sinkhole of a job market. Just as well, since she kicked me out. It was like a bad breakup; we both claim that we dumped the other. Either way, I said the most satisfying words of my life to her for the first time ever, packed up as many of my things as I could, and stood out in the driveway until well after dark until my father could find a free moment to drive the forty-odd miles between my mother’s house and his.

That day began the only period in my life when I’ve ever lived with my father, or even spent more than twenty-four hours under the same roof as him. I wasn’t looking forward to it. My stepmother and I don’t get along; I think she’s a batty, brain-dead twat with a mean streak that makes me look as sugary-sweet as Strawberry frickin’ Shortcake. But there was one bright point: I’d get to spend more than a day or two at a time with my little brother.

That was the only thing that made the next six months worth it.

Our father was constantly busy, struggling to support his family while my stepmother sat on her ever-widening arse and surfed the home shopping channel while making cooing, syrupy baby-talk that made me want to rip my hair out. She didn’t look after my little brother, and our father couldn’t when he was worn ragged and barely able to manage the time needed after work to show my brother some affection and a little discipline. The boy ran wild, wouldn’t do a thing his mother said, talked back to both his parents, and lived like a little Bohemian monkey. He was four years old when I moved in, and he couldn’t even say his alphabet - something that utterly appalled me, especially since I’d taught myself to read by age two and a half. The Pokey Little Puppy; I still know the words by heart.

So that’s where we started.

And for six months, I became my brother’s other parent. Not his mother; not the woman in the traditional relationship of husband and wife. Me. A man. A gay man.

For six months, my little brother had two fathers.

And in that six months, he learned to mind his manners. He learned, after long conversations with me about responsibility and the value of the things our father bought for him, why he needed to clean his room and take care of his video games and toys. He learned his alphabet and his numbers, and soon he was reading The Pokey Little Puppy to me. He said please, and thank you. If I asked him to do something, he did it - and if he did something wrong, he apologized for it. Never once did I have to yell at him, nor did I tolerate his mother’s screaming fits or the hand she occasionally raised to hit him. Never once did I have to do anything other than express disappointment and calmly, quietly explain to him why what he did was wrong; he quickly scrambled to mend his ways and do whatever it took to please me.

Every night I’d put him to bed and read him a story; every night I’d leave my bedroom door unlatched, because I knew within thirty minutes he’d come creeping in to snuggle up next to me, twine his fingers in the long braid of my hair, and fall asleep. He’d murmur “goodnight, Daddy.” Our father was Papa, to both of us. I was Daddy, for a very long time.

His mother he called by name, and never with an ounce of respect. She’d done nothing to earn it, not when it took an interloper in the household to undo the damage that her negligence had done to that child.

Was I a perfect parent to my little brother? No. Not even close. There were times when he frustrated me; there were times when I just had to tell him to go away and leave me alone for a little while. I don’t like children; I do like my alone time. There were days when I couldn’t stand always having him clinging to me; there were also days when he just couldn’t grasp something and it made me snarl in irritation before I bit my tongue and calmed down. I even cursed in front of him a few times; I have a foul mouth, and things slip out in casual conversation without the slightest hint of venom behind them. But was anything that I did evil?

No. And I refuse to listen to anyone who says that it was.

You can’t call a child raised by two men or two women a child from a broken home. You can’t call any nurturing environment a broken home, and you cannot automatically assign labels of “good” and “evil” simply by making them synonymous with “traditional” and “nontraditional”.

And you cannot use children to support your bigotry.

Call me evil. Tell me that I bear the mark of the devil, and then praise that woman who would dare to lay a hand on my flesh and blood in anger. Tell me that I am filthy, unclean and corrupt, for protecting and nurturing that child, for balancing my father’s workload and assisting as a second parent, for filling the role that my stepmother would not. Tell me that hell will open its gates before me and welcome me with relish for those quiet, stolen moments in which that boy felt happiness and peace, curled trustingly in his brother’s arms.

Tell me that the devil will take me for teaching a boy to behave like a human being, and offering him shelter that otherwise would have been denied.

I’ll only smile. Let hell take me. Even if I seem to have misplaced my 666, let the devil have his way with me, and let your god condemn me as evil. Call down your angels, and speak your verses from your sacred book. Exorcise me. Banish me. Damn me, in your ignorance.

It won’t change that for those six months when I was known as “Daddy”, I gave a child the love and care that he needed, and helped build the foundations for him to grow.

If that is evil…then forgive me not, my Father, for proudly have I sinned.

Kom op konijntje doe maar wiebele, wiebele! …what? It’s a tag. Shut up.