I support marriage equality for so many reasons: my father’s experience
in an internment camp and the racial intolerance his family experienced
during and after the war, the gay friends I have who are really not all
that different from me, and also because of a story I read a few years
back about a woman who was denied the right to visit her partner of 15
years when she was stuck in a hospital bed.
My belief is... grounded in the fact that I was
adopted and know there are thousands of children institutionalized in
various foster programs, in desperate need of permanent, safe and loving
homes, but living in states that refuse to allow unmarried couples,
including gays and lesbians, to adopt because they consider them not fit
to be parents...
Years ago, my wife and I became friendly with a young woman whose teenage brother committed suicide after coming out to an unsuspecting and unsupportive father. This woman explained that her father was a football guy, a “man’s man” — whatever that means. She challenged me to speak up for her lost brother because, as she said, the only way to change the heart and mind of someone like her father was for him to hear that people he admires would embrace someone like his son.I hope that soon after Tuesday’s arguments in front of the Supreme Court, people like me won’t have to speak up for those sons or daughters. No one owns the definition of love. It comes in all shapes and sizes. As Toni Morrison wrote, “Definitions belong to the definer, not the defined.”
— NFL linebacker Scott Fujita, in an essay for the New York Times
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