Pride and prejudice

My large, old-school insurance company came out last week as a primary sponsor of the Boston Gay Pride parade. Mind you, this is the kind of place that eliminated its suits-and-ties dress requirement this year! My son and I were discussing the amazing strides that gays have made over the last half-century. Fifty years ago, gays were widely subject to physical, emotional and spiritual abuse as a matter of course. The Stonewall riots, the seminal event that kicked off refusal of gays to put up with police harassment, happened just 45 years ago. The AIDS epidemic stated not quite 35 years ago, bringing the plight of gays into the media forefront. Today, 34 states have extended the right to marry to homosexual couples -- whose weddings were attended by ecstatic family and friends - gay and straight.

My son and I were trying to understand why gay rights had come so far when civil rights for people of color had stagnated, if not retreated since the early 1960s.

Comes down to this: Every family has a gay kid. But not every family has a black kid.

Until every family understands the pain of those systematically oppressed by our culture's institutions, we aren't likely to move farther along in our struggle against racism. The realities of genetics finally took care of the entrenched homophobia. What will it take to root out racism?