On Girlfriends. . .

Aristotle said, “Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.”

I am a very fortunate woman. I have an incredible group of women in my life. My friends, many of whom I see regularly and some of whom I haven’t seen in years, are a blessing to me. There are friends from high school that have recently come back into my life, friends from college I haven’t seen in years and friends from here who have moved away. There are friends I made while we lived in England that I haven’t seen in person since we left. There are new friends with whom the relationship is still being built. Real friends make all the difference in the world,something I've come to realize later than I should have.

My daughter and one of her cousins and friends.

Near or far, all these women enrich my life and just knowing they are there makes me happy. I have male friends too, and they are wonderful, but there is a type of support women can only get from other women that is somehow different. I didn’t always recognize this and the past several years I’ve really been working on learning how to be a friend. Living in the same place for fifteen years has helped. Although there are people you “click” with instantly, it takes time and effort to forge those connections.

Locally, I have a group of good friends that I meet for breakfast once a month. Every time we get together it is a fun, energizing couple of hours. Two other friends I’ve known for even longer and we meet monthly as well. Additionally, I have some terrific women in my neighborhood who have become very dear friends. We have formed a book club and while we do talk about the books, there is much more involved there. There are women from community groups and events I’ve come to know and become friends with. I don’t see some of them as often, but we stay in touch and meet occasionally. 

My Mom, a sister, two nieces, my daughter and my son - no he's not a girl but he's in the picture! : )

All of these women are intelligent, creative and accomplished and they enrich my life in ways I can't even begin to describe. I have friends who share my political and social beliefs and friends who don’t; the same goes for spiritual beliefs. Having friends with a wide variety of beliefs in every area makes me a better person.  I appreciate the differences. It keeps me from becoming complacent and forces me to think things through. My friends span the spectrum when it comes to age. I have friends who are several decades older and younger than I am, and I am grateful for all of them!

It used to be that I wouldn’t take the time to go out to lunch with a girlfriend unless I really didn’t have anything else to do. When I started to realize that it wasn't just a luxury, it was emotional sustenance, was while we lived in England. It was the first time in my life that I consciously realized how much emotional strength comes from having good female friends. I will love those women forever and I miss them.   

 Taking time for lunch with one of my best friends, and some new ones.

In the years since high school I have learned to better recognize what is important in life. Relationships and connections with people you care about, that’s what makes life worth living. Now those planned get together times are set in stone, and unless something major happens, I’m going to be there. It matters. I am also lucky enough to have three wonderful sisters, plus a really amazing daughter who is becoming a great friend as she grows up. I also have other women in my family that I love dearly. My life is rich with wonderful, strong and supportive women.

The friendship between women is different than that between men or between a man and a woman (and yes, I do believe it’s possible for men and women to be just friends. In fact I know it is.). Women tend to make a deep emotional commitment to their female friends. They share thoughts, feelings and experiences. The women I am lucky enough to call friends support each other in times of trouble and celebrate each others’ triumphs. 

As a teen and young twenty-something, I had more close male friends than female and excepting my brothers, where the whole sibling thing changes the dynamics, the only men I've ever had friendships with that are similar to those with my closest girlfriends are gay. This makes me wonder about biological reasons for the differences in friendship patterns and how that plays into sexual orientation. I don’t know if any studies have been done in this area and I haven't looked, but I would be interested in finding out. A project for another time! A study of friendship at Syracuse University concluded:  

 Women devote a good deal of time and intensity of involvement to friends. Friendships between women, more so than between men, are broad and less likely to be segmented.

 

Women usually make a deep commitment to their female friends and their friendships usually cover a broad spectrum, while men's friendships tend to be segmented and centered around particular activities (Gouldner & Strong, 1987; Lenz & Myerhoff, 1985; McGill, 1985; Pogrebin, 1987).

I grew up moving frequently and learned early on that making friends was a waste of time because we would just leave and it was hard. As a result, throughout Elementary and Middle School I had friends, but they were surface friendships, I never invested any effort. That way when me moved, it wasn’t hard. I had my siblings and they were always there. That was where my emotional stability came from.  High School was the first time I actually made real friends outside of my family. It was the first time I’d been in a school for more than a year. I was able to graduate from the same school I started at, something my siblings weren’t able to do as after that brief break, the moving pattern picked back up.

To be honest, I don’t think I was a very good friend most of the time in high school, I didn’t know how to be. Fortunately for me, there were people who seemed to like me in spite of my deficits, for which I’m grateful. I also did not do a good job of maintaining those connections once I graduated. Honestly, it didn't even occur to me that I should, I was too used to moving on. As a result I missed out on a lot. I think I also probably really hurt some friends because I did just move on. Now that I understand it, I regret it and wish I'd done things differently. It wasn’t intentional; I just didn’t know how to do anything else at that time. I got a little better at it in college, but still didn’t do very well for the most part. Fortunately, I have been able to get back in touch with some of those old friends the past several years and I hope to be able to see all or most of them again in the future and strengthen those ties in person.

My daughter and one of her best friends.

 I didn’t really learn how to maintain a friendship until far too recently and it’s just been in the past ten years or so that I began to really appreciate the girlfriends in my life. Our family has had some serious challenges – job loss, health issues, etc., the past few years and I wouldn’t have been able to cope without the support of my family and friends.  Women need other women. The importance of having girlfriends is often minimized, something far too many leave behind with high school and/or college. That is sad, because the kind of support that comes from good girlfriends is essential, both emotionally and physically, really!

It’s just been over the past fifteen years and after the federal government mandated that medical and drug testing be done on both sexes rather than just males (think that took long enough?!!), that scientists have started doing research on the biology of female friendships (there were psychological studies done previously). This came about in large part because of a landmark study by scientists at UCLA  in 2000, reported in Science Daily* and in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Review.  This study revealed the previously unrecognized differences in the way that men and women deal with stress. The results are amazing, but not surprising to most women. Smart women know they need their friends.

 The “fight or flight” response has been accepted as a biological response to stress by humans for years and is still widely taught with no differential regarding sex, but no research until fairly recently used women as test subjects.  The researchers found that while men did indeed follow previous patterns of fight or flight in dealing with stress, women were much more likely to seek the company of other women in times of stress, a reaction called the “tend and befriend” response.

 Interestingly, research proved that this response to stress was far more effective in leading to a sense of calm. This is probably one of the reasons women are less likely than men to have stress induced high blood pressure and heart attacks, as well as other stress related health problems, as explained by Dr. Shelley E. Taylor, a Yale educated Psychology professor at UCLA, a principal member of the research team.

“The different ways that men and women respond to stress may also help researchers understand why men are more vulnerable to the adverse health effects of stress, according to Taylor.

"Men are more likely than women to respond to stressful experiences by developing certain stress-related disorders, including hypertension, aggressive behavior, or abuse of alcohol or hard drugs," Taylor said. "Because the tend-and-befriend regulatory system may, in some ways, protect women against stress, this biobehavioral pattern may provide insights into why women live an average of seven and a half years longer than men." 

Really, women need their friends. I know I need mine. Maintaining and strengthening my female friendships makes me a better wife, mother, person.  So if it’s been a while since you talked to your college roommate or a friend from when your children were in kindergarten, now is a good time to get back in touch. Go out to lunch or at least check out their Facebook page and say hi. You’ll be glad you did and you might just be a little healthier for it too!

Gay/Straight/Blonde/Brunette/Irish/Chinese/Black/White/Male/Female

I haven’t written anything for a while – been too busy doing costumes for Brighton High School’s awesome production of Legally Blonde, the Musical! costumes which, by the way, were fabulous, if I do say so myself. The length of this post makes up for any lack over the past months!

Before you read any further, if you’re reading, here’s the disclaimer, spoiler, whatever you want to call it. If you are firmly set in your beliefs and don’t want to have to think about anything for fear thinking might cause you to question your faith, stop now. This essay isn’t for you. On the other hand, if you’re comfortable enough in yourself and your beliefs that you’re able to give credence to the opinions, thoughts and feelings of others even if you don't agree with them, please continue and I would love to hear your thoughts.

For the past couple of months I’ve been making notes of stuff I want to write about when I have a little time again, but now that I’m actually writing, it’s not about anything I jotted down.  One thing keeps coming back into my head over and over again the past few days, and that is homosexuality. It’s a controversial topic that stirs up intense emotions.  In general, people are unable to separate emotion from fact when the topic comes up. People are killed and have killed over it. It is stunning to me how much time and energy Americans spend focusing on the sexuality of others, which is a pretty private kind of thing, actually.

 I mean, how many of you would consider asking your boss, mother in law, neighbor, math teacher or minister how often they had sex, or what type of sex they had with their husband, wife or significant other? Or even who they wanted to have sex with? You wouldn’t, right? I mean it’s obviously inappropriate, invasive and rude. Yet there is a segment of society who believe they have not only the right, but a moral obligation to try to dictate the sexual feelings and practices of millions of adults they’ve never even met.

When JC Penney hired Ellen DeGeneres to be their spokesperson, I’m sure they didn’t expect the One Million Mom’s group to attack them and demand they fire her immediately (One Million Mom's is not to be confused with the Million Mom March on Washington that happened to protest handguns several years ago – NOT the same group! This bunch is an offshoot of the extreme right wing American Family Association, which, despite the name, does NOT stand for all American families, only those who fit their parameters, i.e., white, republican and narrow minded).

Why, you may ask, would they care that JC Penney hired a well known comedienne and talk show host to speak for them in commercials? She’s an intelligent, articulate and funny person who makes a living entertaining people and she has a huge following. It’s good business, so why the protest?  Here’s why, Ellen is unabashedly and unapologetically gay. Apparently, these women find her very existence an affront to their families and their moral code, which pretty much specifies that anyone who lives or even thinks in a way that they don’t agree with is evil and going to hell. Needless to say, they believe homosexuality is an evil sin the likes of which Charles Manson couldn’t even achieve. According to them, homosexuals not only are evil, but don’t deserve to be able to earn a living, vote or get married. If this group could arrange a way to stop it, they would also try to stop homosexuals from owning property and breathing communal air.

There is a lot of evil in the world. There are people who hurt and molest children. There are people who have no problem selling other human beings to people who are going to hurt, molest and even kill them. There are people who have no qualms manufacturing and distributing substances that destroy lives and minds for profit. There are millions of children who go to bed not only hungry, but literally starving every night. There are people dying from the lack of clean water and health problems that are easily curable and there are others with the money to help with all of these problems and who choose not to. Personally, I find it offensive that anyone would expend an enormous amount of energy, time, effort and money trying to regulate and vilify the sexual preferences of another group of human beings when there are real problems that need to be solved.

I am not trying to glorify being gay, any more than I would try to glorify someone for having blonde hair or being African American or Caucasian or having a birthmark. I do have and have had in the past friends and acquaintances who fit into just about every category of person there is. I have known nice people and mean people, those who are honest and those who are not. I have known gay people who were just rotten human beings. Not as many as I’ve known straight people who are rotten human beings but that’s probably just because proportionally, there just aren’t as many gay people. You get good ones and bad ones in any group of people, regardless of what section of humanity you’re pulling from and I don't think the proportions change much from group to group. 

There’s plenty of science out there showing that homosexuality is no more of a choice than being born brunette, Chinese or with a cleft palate, but that doesn’t matter. Science is not going to change the minds of those determined to stick to a belief that justifies their hatred and bigotry and nothing I think, write or say about it will either.  Nonetheless, I feel compelled to write about it, to share my background and experiences.

I was raised in an extremely religious, extremely strict family. Blind obedience to the parents and to The Church was the expectation and thinking for yourself was not only discouraged, but violently punished. I was raised to believe that homosexuality is a horrible sin, an aberration that wicked people chose to participate in and those who practice it (because they willfully chose to be a part of such a wicked group) will be cast into outer darkness and really are barely even human. Even though I had absolutely no idea what it was until I was probably fourteen  or fifteen years old, I knew being gay was bad.

 I’m not trying to make waves or offend anyone. Through experience I’ve come to believe that arguing about religion, politics or any other deeply held belief doesn’t accomplish anything. Each participant in an argument just leaves more convinced than ever that they are right and a lot of animosity is raised for no reason and without changing anyone's mind.

Gay = Evil. This was something that although I subconsciously absorbed, I never actually gave any thought to. I’m sure I had friends in high school who were gay, but I didn’t know about it. Not just me, no one did. The world was a much less accepting place to gays even as recently as the 1980’s. It wasn’t just the extremely religious who were prejudiced against gays, it was most of society.

If I’d gone to a state school for college I probably would have come up against it sooner, but since I was at a private religious school, confronting the revelation that someone I knew was gay was something I didn’t have to do until I was a sophomore in college.

A few months into the winter semester my sophomore year two good friends of mine who were roommates had a violent falling out. One of them had read the diary of the other. When I first heard the story (from another roommate in their house), this incredible invasion of privacy and betrayal of trust seemed to me like the biggest issue and I thought that's what the fight was about. I was so shocked that Friend A had read Friend B’s diary that I totally missed the "appalling" revelation that followed and had to be guided back to the point of the conversation.

 However, no one else even seemed to think that invasion of privacy was a problem. Apparently the resulting information justified it in many minds.Why? Because Friend A, the snoopy one, had discovered on reading friend B’s diary, that Friend B was gay, something he’d been hiding since he was a child. He revealed in his diary that he had feelings for Friend A that went beyond the guy-buddy thing. Friend A was horrified, disgusted and frightened to learn he’d been sharing a house with a gay man for the past two years and even more horrified to find that this gay man fancied him, even though Friend A had never acted on his feelings. As I mentioned, I was attending a fairly small, private religious university up on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii. There were only about 3,000 undergrad students, so most of us knew each other at least by sight.

The revelation that Friend B, Morgan, was gay went through the campus like a hurricane. No one talked about anything else.  Friend A had gone immediately to officials at the University Honor Code Board  to ensure that he, Morgan, was punished - after, apparently, using his fists to show Morgan just how offensive he found this new information. Friend C, their other roommate, told me he hadn't seen Morgan, Friend B, since the morning before it happened because he'd been on campus all day. By the time I was looking for him, my friend Morgan had disappeared.  

Rumor had it he had been expelled for moral turpitude, apparently it was enough that he had the feelings, never mind that he hadn’t acted upon them.  I heard later from friend C that Morgan’s parents had flown him back to San Diego immediately after they were called by university officials and someone from the school had come by the house later and packed up all of his belongings. I’ll be honest, initially I was just as shocked and surprised as everyone else, it was an automatic reaction.Then something happened. I started to think about Morgan, my friend who was gone...

I met Morgan my first day on campus when we were freshmen. We clicked immediately over something I can’t even remember now, but I remember the warm feeling you get when you connect with someone who you know you’re going to be friends with. I also remember feeling consciously surprised that I wasn't attracted to him because he was really cute and I was just a tad boy crazy at that point in time. We had the same dry, sarcastic sense of humor. Then it turned out we had the same creative writing class and we both went to work on the school paper.  We started hanging out more often and a strong friendship developed.  I met his roommates (one of whom I developed a huge crush on over the next year), he met my friends and I spent quite a lot of time at their house, which everyone just called “the A-frame” on the point. It was a fabulous house and a much better place to hang out than my dorm room. It was on a rocky point just off campus and overlooked the ocean. Sometimes we could see whales from their deck.

Morgan and I spent a lot of time together and despite constant questions and innuendo from other friends, it was never a romantic relationship in any way, shape or form on either of our parts. Morgan was like my brother, only a cool, funny brother my own age who also thought I was cool and funny. My girlfriends could never believe there wasn’t anything going on because Morgan was extremely good looking and were were together so much. Plenty of other girls were obsessed with him but he was never interested in any of them. I think on some level I must have known he wasn't into girls, that's why I could be completely open with him. I always knew he was safe, it's one reason we were so close. I just didn't understand why, at least not consciously.

At the time I never really thought anything of it. He always commiserated with me over my erratic love life (did I mention I was slightly boy crazy?!), but we never talked about his. If I asked he just deflected the conversation somewhere else and after a while I stopped asking. In hindsight, there were times I could have pushed and he might have confided. He must have been desperate to tell someone but afraid of rejection. To be honest, if it had happened I don't know how I would have reacted initially, although I like to think I would have handled it well.

Some of his female admirers, and there were quite a few, were less than subtle and we used to have catty, bitchy conversations picking the ones we didn't like apart and laughing hysterically. If I hadn’t been so clueless and lacking in experience I probably would have figured it out and maybe he would have felt he could confide in me, but I had no idea.

We ended up working together on the School Newspaper. I was the Fine Arts Editor and Morgan was one of the Fine Arts reporters. We went to the beach together, talked for hours over coffee at McDonalds and gorged on ice cream occasionally. I ended up sleeping on their couch many a night when we didn't slow down until early morning. We used to take the bus into Waikiki to go shopping and make fun of tourists or up around the north shore to Waimea Bay and Sunset Beach to watch the surfing competitions. Of course, at that time I had no idea that Morgan was lusting over the hot surfer guys just as much as I was, but it didn’t matter, we always had a blast.

It was the day after this chain of events had rocked our small campus that I was sitting in the car talking to the editor of the school paper, Laura, who was also a good friend. I had up until then managed to avoid facing the situation (not only was I a little shell-shocked, but one thing I learned growing up - just avoid feelings whenever possible - was a lesson I learned well!), but I was feeling the loss of my friend. We’d been somewhere covering an event for the paper, I have no idea what, and once we arrived back on campus ended up sitting in her car continuing the conversation we’d started while driving.

We talked about Morgan. Laura was distraught about the whole situation and seemed to feel that he had personally betrayed her, on purpose, by being gay. Somehow, to her, his being gay was a direct attack on her beliefs, her friendship and everything that she stood for in life. She was obviously feeling hurt and torn up about it and was also confused.

Up until then, I'd been more than a little confused myself. Sitting there, listening to her was when I realized that I didn’t believe any of the stuff I’d been indoctrinated with about homosexuality growing up. It wasn’t anything I’d ever actually thought about before, because I'd never had to, but listening to her and thinking about Morgan I realized it was ridiculous. Morgan was a good person and one of my dearest friends. I knew that there was no way he was evil and that he would never “choose” to be gay just to rebel against The Church. I knew at that point that the fact that he was gay made absolutely no difference in how I felt about Morgan. It just didn’t matter.

 I remember at some point asking her, “Laura, did you like Morgan last week?”

“Of course,” she answered, “you know I did.”

“Well,” I said, “he’s exactly the same person today that he was last week, you just know something about him now that you didn’t know then.”

I remember she was silent for a while, we both were. Then eventually we started talking again. I don’t remember how long we sat in the car, but I do know that by the time we got out it was dark and Laura had made some kind of peace with the way things were. Knowing I was instrumental in helping her to look past the label and realize she still cared about the person just as much as she had before remains one of my proudest achievements ever.  I know this because she told me, years later that our conversation had made her think and thus changed her entire outlook on people being good, bad and gay.

By the time we left the car, I had more than made peace with Morgan being gay. If anything, it made me admire him more for his strength and hurt for him because of the hurt I knew he had to be feeling. I was determined to be there for him. Unfortunately, I never got that chance.

Of course, this all affected my relationship with Friend A and Friend C, with whom I’d become pretty close to over the past year and a half.  Friend A (the one I had a crush on) and I were on the verge of “something,” before this happened. After the whole incident, I didn’t even want to be in the same room with him. I couldn’t speak to him I was so disgusted by what he’d done. In my mind, he was the wicked one, not Morgan. I still feel that way. Friend C and I stayed friendly, but were never as close again. I didn't spend any more time at their house.

I wish I could say that Morgan and I were still friends, but unfortunately we’re not. That is, I would love to be his friend, but I’ve never been able to contact him since he left Hawaii and I’ve tried, especially in the days and weeks after he left. I called his house repeatedly, I sent him letter after letter, but I never was able to talk to him. I was desperately worried about him. I prayed for him (not that he would see the light and change, but that he would be ok.). I even tracked down his house when I was staying with another friend in the LA area before flying back to Hawaii the next fall (well, I found the development. It was a gated community and they wouldn't let me in. I left a note with the gate guard.). Remember, this was back in the days before email, Facebook and cell phones. It was like he'd dropped off the face of the earth.

 His family was every bit as religious and strict as mine was, plus extremely wealthy. He did not have a good relationship with either of his parents, I knew. He’d been brought up with the same violent suppression at any hint of individuality, thinking out of the box or straying from the straight and narrow path that I had, one of the things we discussed frequently and bonded over. His Dad was fairly high up in The Church hierarchy and I have no doubt that his parents were horrified and embarrassed by the entire situation. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn they’d committed him to some sort of “deprogramming” facility or even a mental facility. I hope that’s not what happened, but I’ll probably never know.

I don’t know what happened after he left Hawaii. I don’t know if he ignored my calls and letters because he just assumed my reaction would be like everyone else, or if he never even knew I was trying to contact him. He never came back to school and I've not heard from him since. I still hope and pray that he’s alive and well. I can only imagine how horrible life must have been after his inadvertent “outing” and feeling completely alone was probably the least of it.

Not only was he betrayed and rejected by someone he’d considered his best friend, he was abandoned and vilified by almost his entire peer group. Since he left so fast he probably thought it was everyone. It turned out I wasn't the only one who changed their views when faced with the reality of someone they knew and cared about being the "evil homosexual." I know he wasn't supported by his family or his religion, instead, both were convinced he was choosing to be wicked.

I still think about Morgan once in a while. I hope and pray that he was able to recover from what must have been an incredibly horrible, traumatizing experience. I hope that he is alive. I hope that he emerged stronger and more of who he was, able to stop living a lie and overcome the bitterness of his experience. I hope that he’s found love and that he’s happy. I hope I get to see him again some day.

This incident was another straw in the load that eventually broke the back of my allegiance to a religion that was incorporated into my consciousness and part of my identity since childhood. I had rebelled as a teenager for a while, but it was done strictly as a way of asserting my independence from my family, not because I had spent any time thinking about what I believed and why. I was drawn back “into the fold” in college and tried very hard to stay there for nearly ten years after that.

It wasn’t until my early thirties that I looked at my life, realized I was miserable and really started analyzing why. I found at that time that the religion I was allowing to dictate the terms of my life was not in agreement with most of my views and beliefs. I’m not knocking The Church, as it is known to those who are members (true of any large organized religion, regardless of denomination). There are a lot of good things about it and I know and love many people who are active and faithful members. I’m happy for them and more than willing to let them live their lives however they see fit and I really wish that they would allow me the same courtesy, but, I also understand why they don’t, they are trying to "save" me. 

At any rate, I digress. This isn’t about my schism with the faith I grew up in, it’s about tolerance, love and homosexuality. I do believe in God. I did spend a lot of years in The Church and hundreds of hours studying doctrine and scripture. I know it pretty well and the God I learned about is all about love, which supersedes everything else.This makes it hard for me to understand how anyone can try to justify their persecution of those who are different in any way, including sexual orientation, by claiming they speak for God. Not my God, they don't.

The gay rights movement and the opposing factions are just repeating battles that have taken place over and over again throughout the history of mankind and especially here in the United States. The parallels between Gay rights, Women’s rights and the rights of African Americans, Indian Americans and many other minorities are so obvious it seems anyone who refuses to acknowledge this is being willfully obtuse.

I believe it’s about fear. Human beings in general tend to fear that which they do not understand. We all do it to different degrees, we don’t like or trust people who are different from us and we gravitate towards those we are like. I’ve heard people trying to justify denying basic human rights to gays claim that there is a “gay agenda,” the goal of which is to try to turn all the children gay. I’ve heard them claim all gay people are a danger to children, in spite of the multitudes of evidence that the vast majority of child molesters are straight.

No, I’m not gay and frankly, I don’t get it. I'm not attracted to women, any woman, no matter how beautiful she is and the idea of being physically intimate with a woman doesn't make me uncomfortable, it's just kind of "eew." Not for me. However, I feel the same way about men female friends over my lifetime have dated and married. Just because someone is male does not mean I will find him attractive, in fact, quite the contrary, and I’m far from alone. The chemistry involved in sexual attraction is the point of multiple studies and incredible amounts of research over the past decades.

 I find it no more difficult to believe that one man could be attracted to another, or a woman attracted to another woman than it is to believe that a woman can be attracted to a man I find physically repellant. I don't get it, but I accept that they do. It’s chemistry. In no way do I find it threatening.

I know heterosexual couples who espouse behaviors and political views that I find appalling, and yet when they marry it in no way affects my marriage. Why on earth would two people who love each other getting married affect my marriage just because they happen to be the same sex?  In an era where celebrities change marriage partners like some people change their socks, how can gay people who are in a monogamous relationship and want to get married if they are both of legal age be looked at as a challenge to the sanctimony of marriage?

I have known many straight people throughout my life in terrible relationships. They are married to or with insensitive, unfaithful or sometimes abusive partners. Children who grow up in these homes are damaged. I know and have known far too many children who are neglected and abused, both physically and emotionally. I also know straight people in wonderful, loving and supportive relationships. I have known Gay people in bad relationships and Gay people in good relationships. I’ve known Gay people who are promiscuous and I’ve known straight people who are promiscuous. I have Gay friends I would trust with my own children over members of my family. It’s not the sexual orientation that makes the difference, it’s the type of person they are.

So, bottom line? Even though I’ve really never shopped there in the past, I will now go out of my way to shop at JC Penny, because they are refusing to bow to the pressure of a bunch of bigoted, hate and fear filled extremists and fire Ellen DeGeneres because she’s gay.  I have no doubt that their decision stems from a business rather than moral point of view, but in my mind that’s a good thing. That enough people don't care about the sexual orientation of someone else gives me hope for the future of humanity.