Just a Cock-Eyed Optimist

And, on this day when California begins permitting gay couples to marry, a sign of hope: the picture to the left is from Saturday’s (14 June) Boston gay pride parade, in which Governor and First Lady Deval and Diane Patrick marched with their daughter Katherine, who recently came out as a lesbian. Refreshing and inspiring to see authentic family values in practice.

I also take hope today from an article I happened on earlier in the day—Roy Reed’s “Nellie Forbush’s Hometown.” Reed summarizes the outrage of playgoers when Nellie Forbush, a character in “South Pacific,” said her lines on a Long Island stage in 1957, proclaiming that she was from Little Rock. The reaction was driven by the fact that a week previous, mobs of white racists had assaulted those trying to integrate Central High School in Little Rock (see
http://www.lctreview.org/article.cfm?id_issue=10106306&id_article=48191561&page=1).

Reed concludes his overview of the controversy by noting how much has changed in a half century:

Nellie Forbush's town, half a century later, is utterly American. Nobody takes any notice of the integrated restaurants, restrooms, water fountains, and schools. Some of the big evangelical churches are racially mixed. The worst fear of the white supremacists has come to pass without rending the national fabric: interracial couples are seen in small but growing numbers all over Arkansas, frequently with the dreaded proof of miscegenation, the mixed-race children, all walking the aisles of the Wal-Mart stores. And American democracy, despite the prophecies of doom, keeps shambling along. Even in Little Rock.

I have no doubt that in coming weeks, we’ll hear just as many dire predictions about gay marriage rending the social fabric of the nation. Just as in 1957, those trying to stand athwart history and scream stop may resort to every dirty trick in the book to create precisely the social disorder they predict to follow, when gay people are permitted to marry.

We may—God forbid—even witness the kind of violence that was practiced by some of the goons in Southern states in 1957 to stop integration.

They may have had their say, but they did not get their way. History has proceeded along, making a huge detour around them, and, as Roy Reed says, even some churches in Little Rock are now (miracle of miracles) integrated.

The world went on then, when whites and blacks were allowed to mix and even eventually to marry, and it will go on again, once gay people are married. And looking at the picture of the Deval family proudly asserting that love trumps hate, I’m inclined to be a cock-eyed optimist about the new social developments in California.