President Obama was victorious, but that's not to say his supporters didn't suffer casualties. How many friendships were lost in lead up to the 2012 presidential election?
As the election approached, several gays wrote eloquent Facebook posts stating their hope for equality and how Romney promised to crush this hope. These posts often instructed those voting Romney to delete themselves from their page, which felt passive and not productive. How do you learn or change minds if you surround yourself only with people who believe the exact same thing you do?
After discovering some of my own friends and family had liked Romney's page, I sat down to write my manifesto. I explained how a Romney presidency promised to deny my full citizenship. How would they feel, those who take their rights for granted? I knew some friends vote Republican for other values, including a vast cosmic inheritance. I can accept that, but I wasn't going to allow them the fiction they weren't also actively involved in devaluing me. Maybe one day their rights would be getting clobbered by somebody else's God and when that happens, let's hope I won't need to be persuaded it's more than just politics -- it's personal.
I never asked anyone to delete me. This was a litmus test to discover who cares for me and who only follows to check out all the awesome adventures I'm having without them. I figured I'd lose a few friends, probably people I'd never even met. Others would stay silent, some might be sarcastic, but what I did not count on was the comment which read: "Blah, blah, blah... " The comment itself wouldn't have struck a chord if it hadn't come from one of my oldest friends in the world. MORE
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