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Friday, 09 December 2005 06:41 |
| Mark West
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Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, more or less by default.
Christmas has become a garish nightmare of consumerism, with occasional nods of the head towards religion, in its most cartoonish and mawkish guises, and any sensible person runs and hides as the holiday approaches.
Halloween has become an excuse for people old enough to know better to drink and dress foolishly.
The Fourth of July, of late, has become an excuse for noxious posturing on the part of bought-and-paid-for politicians, the able representatives of the Commonwealth of Halliburton.
Thanksgiving, though, is sufficiently secular so that religious animosities don??t surface, and not so nationalistic that the jingoists get cranked up.
The approved mode of celebration is gluttony, and while that was still one of the Seven Deadlies last time I checked, it is at least one that doesn??t shatter my notions of public propriety.
And a holiday festival with a feast brings home the reality of what American families are like nowadays.
At the Thanksgiving meals I attended, every one in attendance was, in the best sense, family.
And we all had a merry time, playing raucous card games while the kids played disc golf in the front yard.
You??d
have thought Norman Rockwell was lurking in the shadows, brush in hand,
to capture the wholesomeness ?? the Americanness ?±?± of it all.
But
this is the new America. There were five religious denominations, two
major religions and one atheist at our table. Some of the people
present weren??t born in America.
But none of that mattered ?±?± because the great truth of family is that families are formed by consent.
To
turn a noxious phrase into something happy, a family is a coalition of
the willing, and if everybody agrees that Timmy is Uncle Timmy, then
Uncle Timmy he is, whatever a DNA test might say.
Of course,
those of us from the Appalachian Mountains have known this principle
from childhood. Times could be hard enough in the hollows and coves,
and a widow or a fellow down on his luck might be presented to the
children of the family as ?®Aunt Sally?∆ or ?®Uncle Joseph.?∆ There might
be food delivered on occasion, or coal, or the title to a little-used
car handed over. They were family now: You could choose who came into
the circle, but you could not choose your responsibilities toward them
once they had been welcomed into the fold.
I saw plenty of such quiet acts of charity while I was growing up in these mountains.
But
the interesting thing to me is that this privilege, which I already
claim ?±?± the right to decide what my family will look like ?±?± is all
that gay folk request.
Surely nobody thinks that gay sexuality will cease, or even diminish, if we don??t permit gay marriage.
It
seems to me that gays are just asking for something simple, and human,
and humane ?±?± the chance to define their families in the way they think
will most likely make for happiness.
Supporting gay marriage isn??t voting for gay sexuality, which is going to happen no matter what anybody does.
Supporting
gay marriage is supporting family values, things like love and mutual
support, the things we celebrate in the holiday season.
Wouldn??t
that be a nice gift during this holiday season? Shouldn??t all people of
good will wish to allow others to have whom they wish at their holiday
table?
?ÿ
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
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