And Another Thing: Family Values

By Carole Taylor

This time of year most people can’t help but think about family. Despite religious dogma to the contrary, we’ve all got at least one. Even us hummuhseckshuls. Some of us have two or three families, because unless driven from the flock at the point of a homophobic slur, most of us still count our families of origin as part of our extended family.

I like the word we used to use all the time to refer to the person we live with: lover. Now the term of choice seems to be ‘partner’. I don’t much like ‘partner’ although I use it for shorthand’s sake. And I use it when I’m talking to real old and feeble people who might not be able to survive another mention of sex, much less sex beyond the missionary position. I don’t want to cause any more seizures among my mother’s friends than is on their schedule to begin with. I like the term ‘lover’ because it has in it passion and consideration and tenderness. ‘Partner’ feels to me like it should smell of horse sweat and gunpowder. Or else it sounds too much like work and contracts.

But, as it turns out, work and contracts are what this particular column is about.

The terms ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ rasp on my nerves with indifference and impatient tones of voice slung up in a ragged recliner. WEEEEE never do that. Right? But whatever the tone of voice, partners and lovers and husbands and wives are how a family starts. Every gay or lesbian I know recognizes straight families as necessary and legitimate, our own parents and everybody else’s, so it would seem only fair for them to return the favor. I know, I know. And there are little green men on the window sill if I think fairness is even part of most people’s working vocabulary, particularly if under the d’s the word at the head of the list is dogma.

I often wonder what exactly the conservatives, religious and otherwise, mean when they say they support “family values.” Which family values? Which families? If it’s only the kind with one man, one woman, and two kids, then that definition leaves out a huge chunk of even the straight families. Have they not noticed that 50% of their own unbending families end in divorce? Oh. Well. But that’s different. There’s still a penis and vagina involved in the equation somewhere or other. Right, honeypie. It usually WAS in an other, and that’s what caused the divorce in the first place.

And family values of what era, exactly? Most likely some long lost agrarian age when nobody left the farm or the plantation, and the eldest son inherited everything regardless of talent or inclination. Sort of like how the Bush family picked who would get to run for president. Jeb’s a lot smarter, and more qualified, but he lacked the foresight or influence with the Almighty to be Barbara’s first born. Even the Kennedy boys knew you had to wait your turn. Oh. You mean THOSE family values. Gotcha.

As long as there is breath left in a Republican, I’m here to remind you that if you have a family, and you have a value, and the family most important to you is the one you have chosen and not the one you were born into, YESTERDAY is the day you needed to get your life in order. If you don’t have a will, do one. If you don’t have a living will, do one. If you haven’t designated a medical power of attorney, you’d better start interviewing now. Yesterday was the day you needed to start gathering all the different legal bits of paper to protect yourself and your lover. No matter how safe you think your relationship is with your parents or your brothers or sisters, do you know your great niece? Do you know her husband? Do you know their children? Are you SURE they all love you? If it’s not filed at the courthouse, it’s not a family value. The family values you thought would come into play, like love and loyalty and honesty and generosity, won’t amount to used cat litter if there’s the slightest possibility of greed raising its pointed little green ears anywhere in that family, a family you had no idea was so extended. There ARE little green men on the window sill, but this is their home planet.

And like weeds and stray cats, greed is ubiquitous and just as sneaky. When you die or get sick (and however cute you think you are now, you will do one of those things eventually) there may suddenly not be enough love in the family values vault to protect the one person you shared most of your love and values with. Some gays and lesbians are lucky. Some gays and lesbians have birth families that have as one of their values respecting the choices of adults. What a concept. It may be astonishing to you now, you may think it’s an impossibility, but in way too many cases the family you were born into, or the family your lover was born into, will be at the head of the stampede to take everything both of you have worked for when one of you dies. If all you have is a will, any will can be contested. ANY will. Remember that.

All day long and most every night of the week, blood kin steal things from the partners of gay relatives, deny a lover’s right to be at a hospital bedside, deny even that the relationship was what it was. The disparity of treatment given the lovers and children of gay and lesbian people who died in the attacks on September 11 should tell you something. In New York, the governor had to issue an executive edict to assure equality between gays and straights. If the person who died lived in Virginia, so sorry, too bad, next. If you don’t have your papers in order, even if otherwise they’d be calling you a hero, as far as the law of a given state may see it, 18 years with the same faithful soul is vapor on the windshield of life.

This is not news, you say. If that’s so, then DO you have all your papers in order? Have you exercised your own personal family values and seen to it that you CAN provide for your lover? There are ways around what certain straight people feel is their own personal, private body of law, written only for their own private benefit. Guess what. The law doesn’t have a deed on it. The law itself is community property. You own it too.

What better gift of family values can you think to give your lover than a trip to your family lawyer to make sure there is protection for both of you? Ok. Forget that obey part. But at least pay attention to that business about in sickness and in health.

And, well, Christmas will be here before you know it, little elf. Get busy.

Carole Taylor holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called
"A Third Story". You can email her here.