I've placed "comes out" in quotation marks because she's not really lesbian in the "born this way" sense that used to be the rage during the so-called homosexual "rights" movement. Funny, but apparently the movement's degenerated by now into something quite different from the innate rights legal agenda of which homosexual are argued to have inalienable guarantees against arbitrary, disparate treatment.
See Robert Stacy McCain on that, "
But If They’re ‘Born That Way’...":
... why are there more lesbians than ever?
Why? Well, it turns out same-sex "sapphic" relationships are increasingly indicative of liberated lifestyle choices, or in more Zeitgeist-ian phraseology, "gender-fluid sexual expression," especially among women.
Check Robert's
entry for the full discussion. And interestingly, the news today presents us with a rather high-profile example of some fairly acute gender-fluid sexual expression in the case of actress Mario Bello, who's published a lengthy op-ed at the
New York Times demonstrating how her fluid lifestyle choices --- and her same-sex romantic relationship --- are emblematic of the left's culture of anything-goes sexual licentiousness. In "
Coming Out as a Modern Family," Bello writes of explaining to her son her romantic relationship with another woman:
“So are you romantic with anyone right now?” he asked.
I took a deep breath, knowing that my answer, and his response, would have an impact on our lives for a very long time.
He was right; I was with someone romantically and I hadn’t told him. I had become involved with a woman who was my best friend, and, as it happens, a person who is like a godmother to my son.
How and when should I tell him? When I explained the situation to a therapist, she smiled and said, “Your son may say a lot of things about you when he’s older, but he will never say his mother was boring.”
Her advice was to wait until he asked. And now here he was, asking.
About a year before this conversation, I had been sitting in my garden in California, looking through photos and old journals I have kept since childhood. From a green tattered notebook with ink hearts drawn on it to the one I started in Haiti while helping after the earthquake there in January 2010, the journals told stories that seemed woven together by a similar theme.
I read about the handful of men and the one woman I had been in romantic relationships with, passages rife with pain and angst. It seemed when I was physically attracted to someone, I would put them in the box of being my “soul mate” and then be crushed when things didn’t turn out as I had hoped.
I read about the two men I fell for while working on films. I was sure each was my soul mate, a belief fueled by sexual attraction that made me certain I was in love, only to find that when the filming ended, so did the relationship. And I read about the man who asked me to marry him four years ago over the phone, before we had even kissed. Three months later we were in his kitchen throwing steaks at each other’s heads in anger.
As I continued to look through photos, I came across a black-and-white one of my best friend and me taken on New Year’s Eve. We looked so happy, I couldn’t help but smile. I remembered how we had met two years before; she was sitting in a bar wearing a fedora and speaking in her Zimbabwean accent.
We had an immediate connection but didn’t think of it as romantic or sexual. She was one of the most beautiful, charming, brilliant and funny people I had ever met, but it didn’t occur to me, until that soul-searching moment in my garden, that we could perhaps choose to love each other romantically.
What had I been waiting for all of these years? She is the person I like being with the most, the one with whom I am most myself.
The next time I saw her, in New York, I shared my confusing feelings, and we began the long, painful, wonderful process of trying to figure out what our relationship was supposed to be.
There's lots more at
the link (via
Memeorandum).
Bello goes on about how she's uncomfortable with how the term "partner" is used to denote one's sexual relationship to a long-term significant other. Why can't "partner" just mean someone with whom she shares some kind of key connection, like the father of her son, to whom she's not married, but nevertheless considers her "partner"?
Jack’s father, Dan, will always be my partner because we share Jack.
But Bello also says that her ex-boyfriend Bryn is also her "partner." I guess her dry cleaner could be her partner since they share an emotional bond through frequent touching of the same articles of clothing. Who knows? If it feels good do it? If the description fits denote it?
But the "progressive" clincher here is how Bello appropriates the notion of the "modern family" to authenticate and validate a set of lifestyle choices that have left her bereft of the kind of stable, long-lasting family structure that through the millennia has functioned as the fulcrum of social stability, regeneration of decency, and the wisdom of our predecessors:
Whomever I love, however I love them, whether they sleep in my bed or not, or whether I do homework with them or share a child with them, “love is love.” And I love our modern family.
Maybe, in the end, a modern family is just a more honest family.
Love is a good thing, but there a lots of different kinds of love, and societies need standards of right and wrong on what "love" is both morally acceptable and socially reproductive. Middle-aged men might say that they "love" tween girls in their neighborhoods, but society has said that claims of such love are not a suitable basis for the family unit.
Maria Bello is fortunate to have the fame, fortune, and choices that allow her to experiment with lifestyles that bring her the most fulfillment. She's also fortunate to have family and friends who share her morally loose framework of alternative traditions. The problem is that what Bello does --- and what shows like "Modern Family" do --- is foster a false consciousness in the public mind positing open sexuality, fluid non-commital relationships, and openly opportunistic homosexuality as perfectly reasonable arrangements of modern life. But they are not. And most families, and especially children, need something quite a bit more permanent. The destruction of the American family unit has advanced a long way since the 60s-generation declared war on the patriarchy. Society will only continue its descent to barbarism unless enough people stand up and say no, that's not the way we do it around here. Stop obliterating decency and values. We've had enough of your "progressive" war on the tried-and-true family structure in this country.
