Mixed marriage

We had been a couple for over two years. We had flown back and forth, written enough letters to fill a room, and run up scandalously high telephone bills. She had crossed a continent and a border to be with me. Yet when we announced our engagement to her parents, after a stunned silence, her mother’s response was, “But it will be a… mixed marriage.” Little did she know.

My wife and I had both been fortunate to grow up in racially diverse, relatively tolerant communities, where children from a kaleidoscope of ethnicities, cultures and religions learned and played together, and to a large degree, saw these differences as no more important than differences in hairstyle or eye colour. We had both tended to be drawn to children from other backgrounds, and to us, ideas of racial superiority or segregation seemed as bizarre as belief in a flat earth. I can remember being dumbfounded when a tawny-skinned member of the Nation of Islam at a New York subway station shook his head at us and said, “It’s too bad people don’t know the Word.” Seeing our puzzled expressions, he added: “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to mingle the seed?”

Needless to say, there was not the same tolerance in our communities when it came to sexual diversity. Not only was there severe pressure in society at large to conform to gender-based expectations, but in our religious community, these expectations took on a moral dimension. There, any sexuality outside marriage was anathema, and homosexuality was so far beyond the pale that it hardly merited a mention. It went without saying that such a thing did not, could not exist within the church.

Having experienced the pain and dehumanization of hiding my own identity in such a hostile environment, I have become extremely wary of orthodoxies of all kinds. Clearly we need to stand up against injustice and oppression of all kinds. At the same time, I have come to believe that to a large extent, what is important is to be sure of one’s own values and to try to be true to them, while respecting and trying to understand those of others. To me it may seem quaint or odd or silly or just plain wrong that my neighbour adheres to strict dietary laws or doesn’t participate in politics or remains celibate. But so long as she isn’t trying to force me to live as she does, as we get to know each other, we can be enriched by our differences. That’s the kind of world I’m hoping for.