My Family Voted against Me and I’m Supposed to be Okay with that?

After the elections are over, your neighbors will still be your neighbors.

While I understand the impulse to soothe our election anxiety with the notion of “getting along” with our neighbors, ultimately his vapid, “tolerant middle” sentimentality ignores and erases the real problems our country is facing, and must solve. Why? Because some of my neighbors do not believe I have the right to be married to my wife, or legal parent to my children. And by “some of my neighbors” I actually mean “some members of my family of origin.” These same neighbors and family members, people who “love” me, do not see the connection between voting for Trump and leaving my family structurally and legally vulnerable. They try to convince themselves that because they “love” me and my wife and our kids, they are “just” voting for an abstract concept called “protecting marriage.”

Honestly, I am tired of this conversation. I am tired of arguing that tolerance ultimately upholds discrimination, that acceptance and legal protection are what we need. I am tired of carrying around the adoption papers that prove my two children, biologically the offspring of my legal wife, are indeed my children, and that I am authorized to have custody over them, to travel with them, to make medical and other important decisions on their behalf.

It’s true: On November 4th and 5th, on U.S. Thanksgiving day and at the dawn of 2021, my neighbors are still my neighbors. My family is still my family…