Our daughter’s getting married!
What a joyous, joyous day!
But we’re going to skip the wedding,
Cos you see, our daughter’s gay.
We love her more than life itself
And love her wife-to-be;
We’d never be judgmental, but
We simply can’t agree!
I mean no disrespect, of course,
I love her to the core—
It’s just that, when it comes to this,
I love religion more.
comments, after the jump:
The AP begins a story on US opinions toward same sex marriage with what to me is a heartbreaking story:
Barbara Von Aspern loves her daughter, “thinks the world” of the person her daughter intends to marry and believes the pair should have the same legal rights as anyone else. It pains her, but Von Aspern is going to skip their wedding. Her daughter, Von Aspern explains, is marrying another woman.
“We love them to death, and we love them without being judgmental,” the 62-year-old Chandler, Ariz., retiree said. “But the actual marriage I cannot agree with.”
“Without being judgmental”. This is your daughter. This is the baby girl you would have taken on a bear to protect. This is the toddler who retaught you to see the beauty in the world. This is the teenager who broke your heart every time she broke hers. This is the woman who has found the love of her life and would love to have her parents share her celebration.
I can’t imagine a force on earth that could keep me from my daughter’s wedding–I’ll be there even if it’s (*gulp*) in a church!
Love. You’re doing it wrong.
No disrespect intended.
I believe the preferred phrase is ‘with all due respect’.
Particularly in British parlance, it is one of the worst insults one can deliver as a prelude to just about any comment. :D
To not attend a daughter’s wedding is unforgivable. What they were really saying is “We were willing to be polite to her girlfriend to her face for the sake of appearances.”
Now there’s one MIL/DIL relationship that will never be salvaged. “Of course I like you! I just couldn’t bring myself to watch you marry my daughter.”
Anyone want to take a bet on how rarely these folks get to see their grandkids?
@Didaktylos:
I have a slightly different interpretation, though no less depressing. I think Barb might be OK with her daughter’s relationship, but the only way she can reconcile it with her religious views is to draw a completely fucking arbitrary line in the sand.
In this case, the ceremony.
She possibly feels this allows her to passive-aggressively blame her daughter for her own bigotry as well as enabling her to atone to her overlords for tolerating a gay daughter. She probably thinks it’s win-win.
She probably thinks her claimed pain in not attending her own daughter’s wedding is justified by all this…. and that her daughter’s pain is also justified by it.
Charming.
Then one of these statements is untrue, no matter how much you try to deny it. You don’t get to just hand-wave the contradiction away. Just like how prefacing a racist comment with “I’m not racist, but…” doesn’t get you off the hook – you can’t just redefine words to your liking to preserve your self-image as a good person.