Protecting All Families This Christmas

I spoke with a friend this week who isn’t coming home for Christmas. Her relationship with her mother has slowly deteriorated since she came out, and her conservative mom can’t bear to accept her daughter’s female partner. The siblings have chosen sides, and for the second year in a row, they won’t be home for Christmas.

An untold number of binational couples will also spend the holidays apart. In these cases, it might be the children who suffer the most. Daughters and sons raised by single parents, with another, loving mommy or daddy living across a sea of bureaucracy, separating their family until our laws change.

Despite what the Pope may believe, family values aren’t created in some magical fusion of one man and one woman. Instead, family values are fostered in loving households, nurtured by doting parents, and reinforced in supportive communities.

Don’t believe me? Just look at the Christmas story, where we find the son of God in a dirty manger, surrounded by his loving, unwed mother, an adoptive father, farm animals, and strangers from afar. Jesus entered the world through the lens of the most unconventional family, and it was this “chosen family” who ushered him through his formative years.

Narrow definitions of “family” exclude more than gay couples; they exclude single fathers, adopted children, divorced parents, childless couples, and siblings raising siblings. They claim that the love between these families isn’t good enough, pure enough, or strong enough to hold them together.

We cannot be fooled by a mirage of a standard, a paradigm that no one, really, no one actually embodies. Unconventional families deserve respect and support: these families cling tightly to one another in the face of opposition, judgement, and unending amounts of red tape that separate them, year after year, from the ones they love.

So yes, I agree, our churches should be protecting family values. But why not start by welcoming the single mother at our door, ministering to the children of divorce, or securing legal rights for the two moms sitting in our pews?

Defining what families should be is pointless; our task is to uplift and support the families we see before us.

Photo via Flickr user Sara+Ryan