Real Love is Color Blind

Last weekend I had the honor and privilege of officiating my “baby” sister’s wedding (you can just see my bald head in the picture to the right over the groom’s shoulder). Speaking of the picture to the right, yes, my new brother-in-law is a little bit black.1 One of my favorite decorative items at the wedding was the sign posted where the guests entered to be seated, which read, “Today, two families become one. So please pick a seat not a side.”

You see, real love is color blind. When I look at my new brother-in-law, I don’t see a “black man” I just see a man; a man that obviously loves my sister and and my niece and wants to make them his family.

In this day and age when everyone is arguing about marriage rights for same-sex couples, we forget that as little as 46 years ago, it was illegal in some states for interracial couples to marry as well until the laws were changed.2

When I look and my sister and brother-in-law and our two joined, extended families, it gives me hope. Hope that maybe we as a nation have finally stopped giving a shit about what color someone’s skin is and finally started looking at the person they are; hope that if bullshit laws from before 1967 that would’ve kept my sister and her husband from getting married can be repealed, so can the dumbass, bigoted laws that keep two people from getting married just because they both happen to be the same gender.

What I really hope, is that I’ll get to see, in my lifetime, a world where ethnicity and gender cease to be a deciding factor in things like this.

~ JC

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1. The “little bit black” comment is actually an inside family joke from a couple of years ago. My niece, being only around 4 or 5 years old at the time, announced to everyone at Thanksgiving Dinner, “When JJ gets here, try not to stare; he’s a little bit black.” Kids say the damnedest things sometimes, LOL.

2. African American Registry. “North Carolina Accepts Interracial Marriages!”. aaregistry.org.   http://aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/north-carolina-accepts-interracial-marriages (accessed May 5, 2013).