Supreme Court Decision, June 26, 2015: Because We Are Worth It.

June 26, 2015 at 12:48pm

Although my hippie brother did a good job teaching me that an open mind was the most important characteristic you could have and made a space for me in my very strict family to adopt a live and let live attitude towards my fellow man, I can’t deny that the general message I got growing up was that what was wrong with being gay was not just that the Bible said so, but also that there was something trashy, seedy, hedonistic and worthless about it. It was a lifestyle that had no integrity of character - Christian or otherwise - and that was why it was not a good idea to “go there.”

Well, aside from the fact that there is no “going there,” which from just being a believer in science I would have eventually realized, what really showed me differently was what happened when I showed up to life as an intern at the height of the AIDS crisis. You see some cold hard truths about human nature and individual character in the hospital, when life and death are on the table and everything gets very, very real in a blood and guts kind of way.

I saw people abandoned by their loved ones because of the stigma of their disease. I saw acts of devotion that were so open, honest and self-sacrificing that they made me ashamed of myself. I saw selfishness and narcissism and I saw acceptance and I saw love. And it was the quality of this love that I will never forget, because I saw some really, really high quality relationships that stood the test of awful illness and came out the other end stronger. I realized what my hetero culture had taught me to think about homosexual relationships was misleading propaganda. There were examples here of the Real Thing and it was obvious to anyone with eyes to see or ears to hear.

There are of course people who mess up relationships and people who aren’t ready for one, and people who get into something only to change and need out - but that happens everywhere. The idea that gay relationships were somehow pear shaped or laughable was a bad seed that got planted in me, and I am forever thankful for the experiences I’ve had, made possible by the people who helped me become a doctor, that allowed me to root out that bad seed.

Today we rooted that bad seed out of the law of our country and I am very proud. I am thinking a lot about Dr. John Carey, who ran the Special Immunology Unit at Case Western when I was a resident there in the mid 1990’s. Dr. Carey died in an accident when I was still in residency, so I think of him with a mix of sadness and happiness. He was the first person I ever met who referred to his partner as his husband, and he did it when he was chatting with me after rounds one day about life instead of medicine. He told me that his husband always set the table for dinner, and even if they were just eating carry out Chinese, or a peanut butter sandwich, they always ate off the “nice china” that he’d inherited from his mother. Because they were worth it, he told me.

We are all worth it. I’ll eat off the nice china tonight in celebration.