Postcards From The 8

To my neighbor with the sign in his/her window:

I do not know which face among the faces around here is yours. At the mail box, dropping off the rent on a Sunday afternoon, swimming in the pool, or nodding past each other in our vehicles, I am sure some kind of small human exchange has happened between you and me. We’ve smiled or waved or even wished a “good day” to one another, and neither of us were blighted by the pleasantries of being neighborly, but you have that sign in your window, and it bothers me that I don't know who you are.

Every day for months, as summer rolled into winter and winter into spring, I had to look up and see it hanging in the air above the carports—this declaration of your point of view. I’d pile my two small children into their car seats, hand out sippy cups of juice and apple slices, and look up with a grimace at that sign. It wasn’t a complicated sign, it was simple and hard to ignore. “Protect Our Families,” dusty blue and white blocks stamped concise as cut stone masonry above the universal symbol of man and woman (those paper doll symbols hung on doors—there is no mistaking them. We know what they mean, so there’s no risk of peeing in the wrong bathroom). Those two simple, unassuming everyday ciphers just standing there side by side linking hands with two smaller versions of themselves: man and woman, boy and girl.

At first I didn’t comprehend what your sign meant. The figures were so indelibly imprinted in my imagination, that I could not refute their literal meaning. What registered in my consciousness was the universal symbol of a family, and given that I was moving into this apartment complex after separating from my husband, I felt an upsurge of shame and defiance all at once. Ashamed to have failed at a marriage I worked hard to maintain for over ten years; yet, at the same time, insulted that your sign blamed me for not working hard enough to keep my marriage going at all costs. According to that sign, I did not protect my family, I destroyed it.
It wasn’t until several fuming days later that the implied message of your simple sign, its true purpose and meaning, punted into my head in the middle of the night. You weren’t declaring a war against divorce; you were declaring the very definition of a family—the irrefutable representation of man and woman, boy and girl. Like one and one making two this huge sign in your bay window overlooking the entire car park was your mandate to me and everyone else. Your commandment: this IS the American family and nothing else.

Your sign asks me to define marriage as marriage between a man and a woman, that by denying same-sex marriage I will protect the American family, and by supposition, the entire foundation of American life. However, what constitutes a family can never be bound within such a narrow definition, and by denying any citizen equal rights under the law, we all fail to uphold the true promise of our country’s constitution.

What is a family? To me it’s a place of nurturing, support, love, and bonding. It's the warm sounds of the everyday and the feeling of belonging to a place where you surrender your cares into the hands of those willing bear the burden of those cares. The descriptions I give do not come with a gender assignment, nor do they come with ethnicity, class, or religion. A grandmother raising her grandchildren alone, a widowed man raising his daughter, surrogate families, foster families, an older sibling raising younger siblings—these are all families. Just as a newly divorced woman can be as much of a family to her two children as when she was a married woman. Just as two men who care deeply enough for one another to want to commit the rest of their lives to being together is a family. Just as two women wanting to marry so that they can share in the privileges and rights that married partnerships offer under the law is a family.

Your sign, my dear neighbor, does not protect any family at all. What it protects is a stereotype that has never truly represented what families are on the inside, under the propaganda. You protect an icon that doesn’t exist, and it’s a shame that I can’t explain it to you face to face. If I knew who you were, I could offer you a bit of hope. I could tell you not to fear those that are different from you because fear destroys even when it means well. I could tell you that protecting the family is not about protecting a narrow assumption about marriage—there are many traditional male/female marriages where protection is the last thing offered, where shelter and support are absent, where even love cannot make its way into the dark house. If same-sex couples can offer goodness, kindness, and the knit and stitch of familial love to one another, there is no reason they should be denied the opportunity to make those bonds lasting and legal.

Next time I see you in passing and you wave and smile, I won’t worry about what assumptions you might make about me anymore. Staring up at the sign in your window for months and months on end has had an effect on me. Each time I saw it, I resolved to vote against it. I vowed to follow through for once and make my vote count –Proposition 8 may have narrowly passed, but for the first time in my life I voted. I voted, and I will vote again and again and again. So, thank you. Thank you for helping me understand what it means to be a family, and for giving me the courage to do what I have to do to fight for it.

In hopes of a better tomorrow for us both,

Your Neighbor,

Toshi N. Casey