Wave your flags

This week is Pride Week. Events around the country are being held celebrating pride in the freedom to choose a queer lifestyle. These events celebrate the diversity that is life, love, and family. Feather boas, rainbows, and leather abound. Stereotypes are played out in grandiose ways, but there are much more than just stereotypes. Moms, dads, college kids, accountants, doctors, lawyers, and regular people everywhere get out and support gay rights, strides in the movement, and the promise of equality. This happens this week in particular because it was June 27, 1969, that the first of a series of riots began at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. The patrons were sick of being picked on and they started a revolution. They paved the way for the generations to follow. That's how things get done, that's how change comes about.

As I was contemplating on how to write this blog, I felt torn. I wasn't sure how to convey my thoughts and true pride for the queer community. I cannot honestly say that I have overcome that deficit. I can only say what pride means to me.

Honoring pride week means honoring love, without limitations and expectations. I told a friend the other day my thoughts on unconditional love and trust. We come into this world possessing both of those qualities. The trust fades and we cannot ever recover it, at least not while this world contains people who take advantage of that trust. But the love, while it fades, is not something forever lost. Unconditional love is something we can relearn after the innocence of childhood fades. We can learn to see human beings as what they are and love them where they are at. One day we'll get it. That will be second nature.

Honoring pride week also means honoring families. Families come in all forms, they always have. No one questions whether grandparents raising their grandchild is a family or not. I cannot see how anyone can question two women or men who love each other, and the kids they are raising, as a family. I have never been as proud of serving a family in birth as last year when I served a lesbian couple. They were so much in love and had so much love to give to a child. I knew they would only make our world better by parenting their beautiful son together.

Finally, honoring pride week to me means honoring change. My generation, and the ones just before and after, have been ones to foster great change. We ask questions and do not accept injustices. We incite riots and revolutions. We are evolution in progress. That is certainly something to be proud of.

I am glad the ones before us did not back down. I look forward to the day when little children have to ask their mommies and daddies why we remember Stonewall because equality is commonplace in our world.