Optimism

My day started with an email from my dad giving a very homophobic and insulting point of view about same-sex marriage.

Luckily, I have learned to be immune to all this and forgot all about it when I came back from school.

However, as I was having dinner with my family, something about gay marriage came up on the news. So my dad had to ask us if we received his hilarious email. I didn’t answer because I was not in the mood to have this talk again, but oh no, he insisted.

So he starts saying the exact same things he has been saying for 5 years about the bible, god and society to then turn to polygamy, pedophilia or whatever.

I didn’t give him any attention until I realized he was not saying what I expected him to say.

He was talking about freedom, freedom to live your life as you wish. He was saying that two men or two women could love each other.

I just wanted to shake him and ask him what the hell he smoked, drank or inhaled... until he decided to give his opinion about adoption. Did I ever mention that he didn’t believe in evolution? So he went on and on about how god created a man and a woman and each of them have a role in the child’s upbringing.

My sister and I gave up ten minutes later. You just can’t argue with a man who believes the universe was created in seven days.

But I was smiling. I was happy because two years ago my father didn’t even believe that two people of the same sex could love each other, because two years ago he wouldn’t even listen to us when we tried to talk to him about it.

This is when I remembered what my sister told me a couple of weeks ago:

“I’m trying to get dad used to the idea that you might be gay, to help you come out to him.”

She did a great job and I love her for it.