As I cheered for the marchers in the NWA Pride Parade yesterday, a flood of wonder overtook me.  I had met a couple before the parade started who had been together five years but had not yet been able to legally marry due to being the same gender.  One of them showed me pictures of the religious ceremony in which they had pledged their eternal devotion.  They held out their left hands, with matching diamond wedding bands.  One of them told me that her family did not accept their love; one of them said that her Baptist minister father welcomed both of them with open arms.  I marveled at the thought that anyone could scorn the unmistakeable bond that I saw between them.

Across the street, a lone protestor hollered Bible quotes that he claimed proved that all of us would be condemned to hell — all of us, even we who attended to show support and solidarity for those whose sexual orientation differed from ours and had brought them decades of discrimination.  No one paid him any heed, except the occasional head shake.  As the parade started, another man strolled by carrying a sign claiming to know that God hated any who are not heterosexual, whom he described with an ugly word which I will not here repeat.  He moved down the street in silent grimness, as the parade started, the crowd rose to its feet, and the music began.

I snapped photo after photo with my little phone, feeling an inexplicable wellspring of emotion rise within me.  As “a disabled person”, I’ve experienced a fraction of the ridicule that gay, Lesbian and transgender folks experience; a fragment of the unpleasantness that persons “of color” encounter.  But the small societal rejection which I encounter brings me enough pain that I mourn the exponentially greater suffering that those even less “mainstream-looking” than I am must endure.  And endure silently, most of the time — to save a job, to sit in church, to walk the halls of public high schools.  Change has come, yes; but not enough and not soon enough to save scores of young folks who take their lives rather than admit who they are, or endure the mocking of others when they have come out.

What a world, where anyone could think that any being called “God” could condone hatred based upon skin-color or the gender of lovers.  No divine being of whom I can conceive would use that criteria to judge.  If we do, eventually, face a being that assesses our performance here on earth, I imagine that the standard by which we will be allowed or denied access to paradise will include how we behaved towards others who shared this planet with us, including those with less money, twisted bodies, a foreign tongue, or a spouse of the same gender.

Of all the groups marching in the parade yesterday, the one which brought both joy and tears in my beholding of them included a woman carrying a sign that proclaimed her love for her trans-gender son.  Their banner proclaimed them to be families of persons whose sexual orientation and nature was not heterosexual, and the bright, shining faces in that group told the whole story, more clearly than any words I might scribble here.  What a world, indeed.  A world in which love can, after all, conquer hate.