"They Just Marry Someone of the Same Sex"

I usually don't air private family matters on Uh, Yeah Right, but recent events in the news and in my personal life have collided and I feel it's a great learning opportunity for me and my family.

I am the middle of three brothers, and we all have wives and children. Last month, with a couple of sets of parents in town, the 14 of us got together for dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

Now, the political opinions in our family range from far right to far left, and it always makes for interesting table talk.

On this particular night -- and I was not a witness to this conversation, so I'm relating it second-hand -- one of the adults at the table mentioned to my seven-year-old son that the rabbi at our synagogue, a man who is very dear to us and whom my children love, was married to another man. My wife and I had not yet had a conversation with our children about same-sex relationships, and so there was a bit of an awkward moment when my wife revealed that fact and expressed some dismay that it was brought up in this way. Fortunately, at the time, we were able to redirect the conversation and the topic didn't come up again.

Flash forward to earlier this week, when my four-year-old son told his brother, my wife, and me at the dinner table that he wanted to marry a boy in his class. Not wanting to re-open that topic, I fell back on the more common form of marriage and said, "Boys marry girls, honey." That's when my older son chimed in: "But Rabbi is married to a man." D'oh!!! I told him yes, that was right, and then struggled mightily for some words to help him understand. God, where my head went! Thankfully, my wife interjected, "That's a subject we'll discuss when you're a little older." Dinner continued with no further discussion on the topic of any type of marriage.

Seven years old. Good grief! I have to contend with helping my son understand same-sex relationships at his tender age? I just am not too sure of how to start.

But, today I read this piece from The Daily Dish:

Homosexuality is now unavoidable as a public issue. Explaining homosexuality to your kids is much more salubrious and PG if you can place it in the rubric of straight life - "they just marry someone of the same sex" - rather than in the rubric of dark and unmentionable sexual acts. In my experience, children get this instantly. Certainly my own nieces and nephews do. The younger generation sees it clearly. But adult fears and phobias keep getting in the way.

Of course, Andrew's right. Our reluctance to discuss this with our son is based in fear. Keeping it simple is the best policy. There's no need to get into actual human sexuality when discussing this with our children. It just is a fact of life in parts of America that people of the same sex marry each other. One day, hopefully, it will be a fact of life everywhere in the world.

On the other hand, I do understand how some same-sex marriage opponents use the hateful meme that gay marriage will be taught in schools as a way to prevent laws from passing that would enshrine it in our state constitutions. Even though I have a lot of respect for many of the teachers my children have, gay marriage is to some extent something I want to teach to my children in my home. And even though I will do that, I'm not sure I want also to have to deal with the potential confusion my young children might encounter if/when they hear different ways to understand gay marriage from teachers and other students with different belief systems. Is this just another example of my fear? Do I just have to trust that my children will "get it," as Andrew says?

I remember years ago when my older son was in preschool. We sent him to a racially diverse preschool, where many of the kids were black and/or Latino. He used to refer to some of his mates and teachers, without any guile whatsoever, as having "brown skin." My wife and I would recoil a little when he'd say those words, especially if we were in public and he'd be referring to someone he saw in, say, the grocery store. We would quickly reinforce the fact that it was impolite to talk about a person's skin color, because skin color didn't matter. "We're all humans," we would say.

After thinking about it for a bit, however, I realized that his "brown skin" comment was simply how he tried to differentiate himself from others, like he would with a girl, or a grown-up, or someone with brown eyes or dark hair. I was, I realized, projecting my own insecurities and guilt about the prejudices and racism I witnessed as a child, not to mention the anti-Semitism I experienced. When I see him with his second-grade friends now, many of whom are black, I have no fear that he is feeling any of those same prejudices that were so common in my upbringing.

Perhaps this is the crux of Andrew's argument. Children don't differentiate between straight and gay like we do because -- REALLY -- we're all just people. "They just marry someone of the same sex."

Sigh. Growing Up Dad, indeed.