12-year-old reminds us all that same-sex families will not be erased by the religious right

The question asked by Jak Guimbellot, the son of lesbian couple during a city council meeting in Olathe, Kansas highlights a huge portion of the American community which the anti-LGBTQ industry is trying to make invisible:

“I just don’t understand why if I’m with my mothers and we decide to go to a restaurant to eat, that we can be denied access and have to eat somewhere else,” Jak said. It’s a question his mother Kate Guimbellot said she’s never been able to answer. And it’s a question at the heart of a years-long debate throughout Johnson County and the Kansas City area, as the LGBTQ community pleads for cities to adopt ordinances protecting them against discrimination.

The situation in question is about the attempt to pass LGBTQ protections in Olanthe, but it means so much more when it comes to the larger question of our community's equality and safety.


According to the Williams Institute:

There were more than 700,000 cohabiting same-sex couples in the U.S. in 2016, including 346,000 male same-sex couples and 359,000 female same-sex couples. An estimated 114,000 were raising children, including 86,000 female couples and 28,000 male couples. Like male-female couples, most same-sex parents were raising biological children (68.0%), but same-sex couples were significantly more likely than different-sex couples to be raising adopted or foster children. Among couples with children, over one-fifth (21.4%) of same-sex couples were raising adopted children compared to just 3% of different-sex couples, and 2.9% of same-sex couples were raising foster children compared to 0.4% of different-sex couples.

 But when the anti-LGBTQ industry (groups like the Family Research Council, the Alliance Defending Freedom, etc)  talk about our community, they omit people like Jak and his family.

Every utterance and narrative we hear from these characters is how the LGBTQ community is pushing some so-called radical agenda. We are supposedly attempting to "indoctrinate" or "recruit" children. We are the dangerous invading horde out to wreck and destroy the tapestry of the American family.

It's deliberate that the anti-LGBTQ industry refuses to acknowledge our families as a part of that tapestry. Acknowledging our families throws a huge monkey wrench into their entitlement mentality that somehow they have the patent on the word "family" or families which fit their specifications are the only ones which matter. . They don't want to admit that our families and the children we are raising have an equal stake when it comes to issues like education, civil rights, bullying, and schools.

Well that's too bad for them. Neither our families nor our children will take a backseat to suit their narrative and we definitely adjust our lives to fit their broken down semantic ideas of "tolerance." When it comes to our families and our children, we have every right to be as pushy and obnoxious as they are to ensure that we don't take a backseat.

Because we don't have to.