marriage equality.

When I was a recent college graduate, Bob Dole was running against Bill Clinton in the presidential election. For the first time in a national election, marriage equality was a hotly debated issue. At the time, I believed Clinton to be a stronger proponent of same-sex marriage, so when dinner conversation at my grandmother’s house turned to politics, I was naive enough not to know better than to share my liberal views with my then-conservative ex-Marine uncle (ironically enough, when Obama ran for President his house had the most pro-Obama anti-war signs in his gated community). I wondered aloud how allowing two people who wanted to legitimize their relationship and raise children together would destroy family values? My uncle didn’t have an answer, but he did have a lot of angry pejoratives to describe how he felt about homosexuality, and he wasn’t shy about sharing them with everyone at the table, including my mother, my father, my grandmother, and two of her best friends who were like aunties to my uncle. I was incensed, not only because of his hateful language but because he had taken the cheap way out of what could have been an educational conversation for me. After all, in September of his first year in office, Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law.

Of course, that bit of news flew under my radar at the time. After all, it was easy to ignore policy and politics as a 21-year-old in a heterosexual relationship. My rage for my gay friends quickly faded, especially since nobody was even remotely interested in marriage yet anyway. So it’s interesting how upset I am at our new POSPOTUS (Piece of Shit President of the United States) and his leaked executive order establishing a government-wide initiative to respect religious freedom. After all, I’ve already been married once. I’m not sure I would want to bother with it again. So why are my political hackles standing on end?

I think what bothers me most about our new fuhrer is that he has been issuing executive orders since the day he took office seemingly without a real adult lawyer reviewing them for their constitutionality. Certainly nobody in the Oval Office seems to be considering the backlash of the orders or their impact on the solidarity of our nation, nor our respectability globally. He’s already proven that he’s selectively prejudiced with his executive order on immigration that targets Muslim countries, despite the actual facts showing that the countries included in the ban have produced just 7% of all the Muslim terrorists who carried out attacks on U.S. soil since September 2001. As reported in the Daily Caller, “countries unaffected by the travel ban have produced 93 percent of the perpetrators of terror attacks — and all of the deaths from terror attacks — in the United States in the last 15 years.”

Love or hate Obama, he carried our nation forward with the Marriage Equality Act–in more ways than one. He created a nation that was inclusive, not just tolerant. A nation that was finally moving beyond “accepting difference” to celebrating diversity. A nation where people had to move beyond “just being polite” to actually facing their prejudices. And now we have a President (I shudder to even capitalize the word) who wants the alt-right to know “it’s ok to hate.” So maybe the bile rising in my throat is the echo of the frustration I had as a young person, trapped in a living room full of people who thought nothing of sharing their views with me but thought it inappropriate to allow me to share mine. After all, Trump’s latest attack on equality will attempt to gag the LGBT community once again–only this time, we’ve got our fists up, and we’re ready to fight. I worry about the pain and suffering we will be facing across the country. Because apparently, if this new executive order is signed, it won’t only be ok to hate–it’ll be government-sanctioned hate.