According to Larry...

It’s an easy thing to get over!.... Imagine a line between prejudice and acceptance. Whether the issue is race or sexual orientation or gender, imagine the line. Hard-liners are on both sides, not easily persuaded, minds made up, end of discussion.

Yet what amazes me is how fragile that line is and how easily it can be crossed from right to left. Many who have moved out of the shadows of fear and meanness into the joy of inclusiveness have made remarks like “then my nephew married an African-American and we got to know her and we came to realize....” The same is true for many who discovered their friends or family members are gay. When you put real faces on the objects of hate, or the objects of mere discomfort, the line begins to look a lot less formidable. In fact, crossing that line is surprisingly absent of trauma because it is a move away from a debilitating drag on one’s life to a healthier state of being. It is never traumatic—never a bad thing—to get well!

It is so much easier to live by what we love, rather than by what we hate or fear or don’t understand.

Yes, it’s true! You can be rabidly racist or homophobic one day, and then the next day you can simply redefine things—it is literally possible and even easy. And from that moment on, it’s like, wow, it’s so easy to accept, to share, to love, to treat others just like we’d want to be treated ourselves in those circumstances. It can suddenly become easy to see: it’s no sweat off your back to step over to the sunny side of the street. The Golden Rule is indeed all we need. It trumps every prejudice, every religion. It is the easiest “How To” manual ever written for stepping over the line.

I remember how angry I was at the sight of that small fringe of the gay community who are rather flamboyant. I was angry because I was sure straights would see only them and imagine them to be representative of the entire “gay community.” But then one day I thought, Wait a minute. Who are they harming? Absolutely no one. Live and let live. Be grateful for some vestiges of diversity in a world rapidly losing it. Enjoy the color of culture. Savor it. Protect it from those who would harm it by making our existence conform to one big cookie cutter. And from that moment on, without any big “sacrifice” or trauma, I simply accepted the more flamboyant among us as a part of that great, colorful fabric of our society. That fabric would be diminished, less colorful, in their absence. It’s removing them that would damage the fabric, not the other way around. So I have experienced crossing the line, in a small way. It really is an easy thing to do—and makes you healthier to boot.

For the skeptics, let me add that behaviors are a different issue. Stereotypes are often totally wrong or at best notoriously misleading. Plus they ascribe to an entire group the misbehaviors of a few. We should ignore stereotypes! But remember, no one is suggesting that acceptance of all people means acceptance of bad behaviors. How people behave is a different topic.

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