FWIW...

This weekend we did a lot of catching up on nothing.  Watched a lot of TV, mostly just veging around.  Saturday night we watched a very interesting show in HBO.  It was a documentary, entitled "Rosie's Family Cruise" and it spotlighted the initial "R Family" cruise for gay families put together by Rosie O'Donnell and her partner Kelli. I was quite surprised at my reaction to it.

Now I know what a lot of you think of Rosie.  She'd probably agree with you.  And yeah, the documentary was a bit over the top on the self-promotion side since it clearly was made in part as an advertising ploy for future cruise bokings.  Yes, I disagree with her politics and her constant insertion of her foot in her mouth, and I'll never understand her crush on Tom Cruise, but clearly her family is important to her.  And not just as a political tool.

Surprisingly, we enjoyed it.  And you know what?  It wasn't preachy.  Or political.  Well, scratch that.  There was one brief scene in which Rosie and Kelli were discussing the defense of marriage act and how it had been voted down.  But that was just 2 minutes out of 90.

Read the rest in the extended...

The other 88 minutes focused on families.  All kinds of them.  The variety of families on the ship really made the point that a family is about who you love and who you remain committed to loving, not just one mom, one dad and 2.9 kids and 3 pets.  The only thing that these families had in common was that someone they love is gay.

Some families had two gay parents, some consisted of gay partners and the children from their previous marriages.  Some were straight parents with gay teens.  Some were what we think of as "nuclear" families on the ship to vacation with gay friends and family.  Some families were gay partners that didn't have children yet.

One particularly touching moment in the film documents a lesbian couple's struggle to conceive using less than optimal insemination techniques because the laws of their home state don't allow non-married people to use state-of-the-art medical breakthroughs.  After they receive the news that once again, they aren't pregnant, they attend an adoption seminar on the ship, and meet a gay male couple looking for an egg donor or surrogate.  The two couples decide to form a friendship and explore the possiblities of sharing their family journey.

Another touching moment was the story of two gay men who were the second couple to adopt a child after NJ allowed gay couples to co-adopt.  They had been foster parents, initially to two children, and adopted each of them, and through the social workers learned that their sons had two sisters and a brother still in the system, and later adopted all three of the other siblings.  They decided to participate in a wedding ceremony on the ship, even though they had been together more than a decade, because it was important to their children for them to get married.  The kids wanted to know that Daddy and Poppy would always be together.  Even if it means nothing legally.

The film also focused on older children in gay families, and their stories of growing up in the last decade with two moms or two dads, and the experiences they had.  One girl told how the love her two Dads share makes her know they'll always love her no matter what.  Another shared a story of her disappointment at the age of 8 or 9 on discovering that she wasn't a lesbian like her mom because she wanted to kiss boys.

There wasn't a lot of Rosie, either.  We see a few scenes of Ro on stage, and Ro and Kelli and the kids, just normal down-to-earth things, like tying shoes and going to Sea World on a shore day.

As many of you know, I've always been a proponent of gay marriage.  At least as far as the law is concerned.  What each individual church has to say is up to them.  But to me, legal marriage is merely a special kind of contract that imparts certain rights and responsibilities unto two partners, under the law. $30 for a marriage license bought me a hell of a lot of peace of mind.  Two committed gay partners spend up to 1,000 times as much, and some times more, in legal fees to ensure the same rights are clearly ennumerated on a piece of paper.

And as for gays being parents, well, why the hell not?  Sure, it's difficult for kids to explain a "different family", but how is that any worse than being the "poor" kid or the "nerd" or the "fat" kid or the kid with siblings adopted from a different ethnic group?.  A kid needs two parents.  Two.  They play off each other.  It doesn't matter if they're two men, two women, or one of each, the roles of parenting establish themselves pretty quickly.  It would be a gross-oversimplification to compare parenting roles to Bad Cop and Good Cop, but the analogy is apt.  The most important thing is for kids to have 2 loving parents and supportive extended family, no matter what they look like or who they sleep with at night.  Gay parents, from all accounts, are probably MORE likely to stay together than straight parents.

And at the heart of it, that was the message of the film:  families are about love.  Love comes in all shapes and sizes, depending on how big your heart is.