The 21st century family

I remember this: I was teaching an advanced creative non-fiction class to undergraduate business students. Students who take to majoring in business are generally whip-smart, but they also tend to possess pretty deterministic world views.

As a representative of the non-business mode of thinking, I had felt burdened with the task of attempting to "break" such views, or at least instill some sort of uncertainty and doubt into them.

From day 1 we ran into problems of definition. Can one define what a "family" is?

Everybody said in unison, "yes".

It's easy--a family comprises a father, a mother and children. I had winced at the patness of the answer; but by then I had got used to such patness in every answer that a typical business undergraduate was capable of giving.

"A family could be any unit of emotional intimacy," I had suggested. "A woman with a cat could be a family." I hadn't spoken of the gay and lesbian family because the frame of reference simply wasn't available back then.

This was in 2000; the young corporate-acolytes in my class thought I was joking.

At that time corporations didn't seek to normalize the non-traditional/non-heterosexual family. (Now even Budweiser has an ad showing a soldier coming home to the embrace of a male "special" other).

Thus the J.C. Penny catalog celebrating Father's and Mother's days with images of alternative families--the one I had poster-childed with the "woman with a cat" theme--would only elicit nods of assent were I to teach that class today. To do otherwise would be unsophisticated and unmodern.

Heart of Marriage Equality-Ness

When Allen Ginsberg wrote sardonically about the "Communist scare" in America in the 1960s, in his poem, America: An Open Letter, he unearthed the hypocrisy underlying the fear-mongering.

What if the communists invade America and America becomes a nation of dreaded Communist values? Momentarily Ginsberg slips into the shoes of the anti-Communists and says, "Oh no, when America becomes a Communist nation, god forbid how the poor Native Americans would be free to have equal opportunity to education and how the "Niggers" would be de-negroized and rendered equal citizens along side the white privileged class!"

That was mock-empathy at its best.

Cartoonist Brian Mcfadden does a swell job with a similar kind of mock empathy in his "The Strip". He slips into the "fears" of those who want to deny marriage equality rights to gays and lesbians in America, and emulates their paranoia in light of President Obama's recent declaration that he is "for" marriage equality.