The dictionary defines love as:
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A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.
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A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance.
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A person who is the object of deep or intense affection or attraction; beloved.
Sounds good to me! Personally, I can’t find anything wrong with that, and I’m guessing that you don’t either. Or do you?
Take away all the frills, the songs, movies, and books, and what you have left are those simple definitions. Aside from the dizzying expectations, healthy or not, the core of love is very simple and ageless. While love is primal, (and fundamentally chemical I’m told), it is, and always has been, governed by what even our earliest societies considered “normal”. Normal is such a loaded word, shaped by politics, religion, and general cultures. One can only wonder at what is or was considered normal at any given time. Normal to ancient Pharoes was marrying your sister, for what it’s worth.
If you’re old enough to be my parent then your parents may remember when it was unthinkable for a white to marry a “person of color”. If you’re my parents age, you may remember, though you would have been only a child at the time, how in 1967 it was made illegal to prohibit interracial marriage in the United States. And while no one my age could imagine things any other way, it wasn’t until the year 2000 that Alabama finally removed their constitutional law stating: “The Legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro, or a descendant of a Negro”.
Ummm… hello? Negro? I don’t know what scares me more, the fact that the law was on the books that long, or the fact that, when polled, only 64% of Alabama State residents felt the law should be removed at all. What a hateful legacy, and apparently one that quite a few people are quite all right with, even to this day. The times may change, but very slowly. They change, yes, but there is always someone else to hate, and love to damn. We give them titles and labels that polarize a people immune to caring into zealots of purity and tradition. Now we say faggot-gay-homosexual with the same deliciously evil fire that we used to say… well, I won’t go there. Names have power you know and I won’t feed that fire.
Oh, how that fire rages. While most of us may not be bothered by Sapphic love, gay love, there are bastions of power, institutions of learning and faith, who feed that fire with an unholy (and thoroughly unseemly) glee. Individuals, just like your boss, your coworkers, your brother, your mother… yourself? They burn the faceless ‘deviant’ with the surety of an unyielding faith based hate, and for what? What do we gain? I’ve heard children spout the most vile filth, filth they hear from adults who should know better, and it’s so safely couched in religious truth. Little mouths spewing poison, sanctioned by “God”. Forget what the bible says, forget those words of man. Jesus loved everyone, thieves, whores, and the righteous alike. What sin, love?
I have to be honest. I couldn’t give a crap what two consenting adults do in their bedroom. I couldn’t care less whether or not they hold hands in public, get married, or have kids. I am no less uncomfortable with gay PDA’s than I am with two straight teens thinking tonsil hockey is the next big thing. Everyone, get a room! I really don’t care who you have sex with over the age of 18, or how you do it, as long as you do it with a condom. I don’t care if you bake yourself an apple pie Aphrodite and do obscene things with Cool Whip! Knock yourself out! I really… don’t… care.
You know what I care about? I care about the fact that 39.5 million people are living with AIDS every day, and that those numbers rose for the last two years in every region in the world, including our own. I care about that fact that every six seconds someone dies because of it. I care about the fact that 200,000 people a year, (mostly women), are raped in the United States and that 44% of them are children under 18. I care about the fact that the national deficit is 8.8 TRILLION dollars. I care about the fact that nearly 46 million people have no health insurance and many are suffering from things they can’t afford to treat, in this, the most wealthy and powerful nation in the world.
These are the kinds of things I care about.
I don’t think I can stress enough how there are so many more important things to worry about than how people love each other. Just love each other. Love with your whole heart. Love like there may not be a tomorrow. Love your neighbor, hell, I’d settle for you introducing yourself to your neighbor. Love like it’s going out of style, like you and the person you love are the last two people on earth. Tell your parents you love them, tell your kids. Tell someone you haven’t told in a long time. Tell someone who doesn’t know it yet. Be a part of something beautiful, something positive, something other than hate, hellfire and damnation. I ask again, what sin, real sin, the kind that actually matters, is love?
