The tide has come in.

2013 was a barn-burner, eh? The Year the Internet Finally Ate Itself. The year where being offended became the national pastime and stockpiling offenses committed by nebulous Others was more or less the sole purpose of Facebook.

We've gotten really good at permitting ourselves to be distracted from things that really matter. It seems like we've just now noticed that we have to share the planet with lots of people who don't think the way we do, and rather than relaxing our stances just a tad, to allow those competing stances to have some room of their own to breathe, we instead rage all-out culture war fueled by sensationalist journalism and pundits who make shit up out of whole cloth and pass it off as truth. 

Rather than vigorously debate how we can improve the quality of life for our citizens, we get in pissing matches about whether or not a camouflaged bigot with a beard and a duck call should have to endure public backlash for saying idiotic things. Rather than address the urgent issues of class and racial inequality in the United States, we watch a grown man with a Rambo complex murder a teenage boy armed with Skittles because black people are scary, and then parlay his crime into fame as a folk hero for people who wear teabags on their clothing and stockpile exploding hollow-point ammunition to fight off hypothetical invaders.

It's hard out there for an intellectual pimp.

But from all of the offense emerged something peculiar – despite all the bluster, change was happening. And I was able to witness it firsthand.

In 2005, the state of Kansas (my home state) placed before its voters an amendment to the state constitution that would define marriage as solely between one man and one woman. This amendment is more restrictive than most; under it, civil unions are invalid, as are common-law marriages. The amendment passed with 70% of the votes in its favor. SEVENTY. PERCENT.

For an idealistic, bleeding-heart twenty-something, this was embarrassing and devastating. It’s impossible to grow up in the shadow (45 minutes away!) of the Westboro Baptist Church and not feel like you have a responsibility to fight that kind of noxious hate. I paid lip service to the bigotry most of the time; sure, I went to Pride rallies with friends and carried signs at counter-protests, but I also had this Straight Privilege that meant I didn’t really NEED to get that involved. I thought it wasn’t really my fight, and in 2005, after that amendment zipped through with 70 goddamn percent of the vote, things looked pretty bleak.

I entered a period of intellectual malaise, as people in their early 20s often do. I had gotten some pretty bitter doses of the world and I didn’t want any more, and I started tuning out these issues as other people’s problems. Fortunately this attitude was destroyed by the wrecking ball that was graduate school. My life was upended by my time at the University of Idaho; personally, professionally, and morally and intellectually as well. I started thinking about stuff again. I started paying attention to injustice, to bigotry, and I started recognizing the signifiers of institutional systems that make life really hard for people on the outside of those systems. It was a massive wake-up call. I began to see how all systems of oppression are connected.

I had an amazing professor at Idaho who not only planted ideas in my head, but showed me how I could actually bring about change on my own. Barry was my Socrates, but holy shit, I’m no Plato. Barry once told me a story about a friend of his, a former militant leftist affiliated with the Weather Underground in the 1960s. This friend became an investment banker, but retained his political philosophies. The friend was often challenged and accused of “selling out,” of betraying his values and embracing the evils of capitalism. “But you see, he knew what he was doing,” Barry said. “He was working from within.”

Working from within. Now THERE’S an idea. So that’s how you change things.

I bring all this up because I'm nothing more than an idealistic, (mostly) straight kid who gets heartburn from injustice, but I also like to make excuses and I had long told myself that the gay rights thing wasn't my fight, that there was nothing I could do except support my gay friends and love them without exception. On the contrary - I could help topple this system from the inside, as an outspoken ally. I just needed the proper context for this eureka moment.

Jump ahead to March, 2013. I was making arrangements to travel to Washington, D.C. to read a paper at the PCA/ACA National Conference. Checking the dates, it dawned on me that my visit was coinciding with the U.S. Supreme Court's hearings on two major cases related to same-sex marriage. This meaningful coincidence was enough to prompt me to make my way down to the Supreme Court for the arguments in United States v. Windsor. 

I got off the airplane, hopped on the Metro, and made the mile or so walk from Union Station to the Supreme Court. I was toting all my luggage with me - I hadn't even been to my hotel yet - and probably looked like an insane person. As I got closer to the Courthouse, I started encountering groups of people walking the same direction, carrying signs and holding hands as they meandered down First Street.

It was a beautiful sunny day with puffy clouds everywhere, and the vast majority of the assembled crowd had turned out to support Edith Windsor's case - an interesting one, because it revolved around money and the right of married couples to avoid estate taxes after the death of a spouse. I saw one dude with a big hand-painted sign with an out-of-context Bible quote on it, but men in drag were posing for pictures next to him, which sort of took the bite out of his argument.

A ruling in Windsor's favor would effectively render federal restrictions against same-sex marriage unconstitutional. The atmosphere on the sidewalk outside the building was nothing but optimistic - even joyous. I couldn't stop smiling, in fact. This made a huge impression on me - you could sense that a turning of the tide was imminent. It was a moment where the energy of the movement had gathered enough momentum to start pushing back against the institutionalized bigotry of prior decades, and that energy was palpable. It was impossible to stand there in that crowd and not breathe as one.

I was able to stand in the courtroom for what felt like a minute or so, but was probably longer than that. For obvious reasons, many people wanted to be in the courtroom to hear the oral arguments, and they whisked groups of people through at a pretty rapid pace. While I was there, attorney Paul Clement (the government's lawyer) argued his case in defense of the government's restrictions on same-sex marriage, to some eye-rolling from the spectators (as in, me) and skepticism from the Justices. Particularly Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is a national treasure, she's such a damn badass.

I walked up and down the street, took pictures, chatted with people. There were lots of activist groups handing out stickers and signs and rainbow flags. I met two women and their preteen kids. The women had been together for almost 30 years, and had driven from Ohio to tell their story. One of their kids held a sign that said "I love my moms!" The kids were polite and friendly, their moms down-to-earth and optimistic in spite of their inability to have their partnership legally recognized. 

One family, one story. One of many. There were hundreds of stories in that crowd; stories of rejection by parents, by pastors, by friends. Stories of starting over, stories of love being someone's only salvation in the face of cruelty. Stories of people being forced to deny the fundamental truth about who they are to pacify all the people around them who tell them that their existence is "wrong."

It was clear to me then, the level of injustice that we tolerate in the name of always needing an outsider or an "Other" on which to project our insecurities. These people that gathered outside of the court were demonstrating for their right to love, to exist, to be themselves in a world that would rather they didn't. But that day, I felt the tide turning, and turn it has. I have strong emotional responses to injustice when I see it, and being there to witness the turning of this tide is still one of the most profound experiences I've ever had.

We simply cannot remain silent about the myriad issues that fall under the gay rights umbrella. I'm talking to you, straight people. We've got some power here, and rather than exploit that power to continue reinforcing these divides that paint gay people as less than human, we need to use that power to highlight our shared humanity.

This experience was meaningful because I felt, for a brief moment, like I was standing on the shoulders of giants. Another time, another decade, and I could have been walking with Martin Luther King or Bobby Kennedy down those same streets. The human struggle is an old one, pockmarked with violence and unrest and disaster. The contentious issue changes, but the quest is the same - all people want to be treated like people, and loved without exception.

We cannot continue making exemptions and exceptions for who is worthy of human decency. This point was driven home for me repeatedly in 2013; all of the hot-button issues of the year could have been solved by merely acknowledging our shared humanity. This goes both ways - no matter how bigotry and injustice inflame our passions, the only reasonable course of action is to meet hatred and ignorance with love.

Here is to another year of shameless idealism, of working from within, of cultivating our shared humanity, of allowing the joy and optimism of a just cause to surge through us and motivate us to love all others without exception.

I'll leave you with a verse from the Dhammapada, one of the canonical texts of Buddhism:

For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule.