I was recently in a bar with one of my best friends and former roommate of four years, innocently enjoying our beers and catching up, when a drunk guy approached us. This is not an unusual occurrence, given our surroundings, but what he said to us was. Taking in our answers to a few random questions he posed (yes, we lived together, and yes, we actually were just discussing adoption) he assumed we were a couple. We did not try hard to deny this, mainly because that saved us and him a lot of time and energy if he was looking for a hookup. It did occur to us that he actually may have been, in his drunken stupor, convinced that if he kept talking to us and buying us drinks that we would make out, but we knew that was not going to happen so we judged him to be essentially harmless.
He ranted and raved in our favor, going on and on about how we should be allowed to marry and adopt and we cheered him on. And then he stood up and announced, “I should be allowed to marry this pole if I wanted.”
Pause.
I pointed out that has nothing to do with gay marriage. He continued as if I had said nothing, and went on a gleeful diatribe on how anyone should be able to marry whoever and whatever they want, regardless of the other party's ability to consent. Farm animals, inanimate objects, whatever. And at this point we were both chiming in, mainly for the benefit of the rest of the bar patrons, all of whom were now watching us intently (and as I later learned, taking bets as to whether or not my friend and I were truly a couple), saying over and over that allowing gay marriage is allowing two consenting adult human people to marry and gain all the tax, medical, and next-of-kin benefits married people possess. His passionate entreaties to the government to allow anyone to marry a pole or a Great Dane did nothing but relegate gay people to inanimate objects and pets, and we were increasingly uncomfortable. Unfortunately, we were also unable to leave due to the beers we’d enjoyed before he intruded on our perfectly lovely friend-date.
Encouraged by our earlier positivity and disregarding our very sudden and severe change of tone, he continued to spout half-liberalisms, thinly disguising a vast ignorance that forced me to wonder just how many people in the world consider themselves forward-thinking simply because they discharge these snippets of liberal foil, barely covering a whole casserole of ignorant, backward ideologies. And then I guess we were friends by now, because he moved past his faux-pro-gay cheerleading and brought out the big guns. Assuming, at this point, that we were Super Liberals (what does that even mean?) with a steadfast We Are The World mentality, he decided to really test us and asked our opinion on miscegenation.
Don't... read it again. Just, trust that you read right.
We gaped at him. And he kept. Talking. Quickly covering his tracks(?) and saying the following: "Of course you love diversity, right? I love diversity. Well if you mix the races there will eventually be no more diversity so you're losing that thing you love so much. What will you do in the future when there's no diversity? What will you love?"
At this point all our words were gone, vanished, vamoosed from our brains and mouths. I wish I'd been able to speak, because I would have at least been able to tell him that what he said doesn't even make SENSE, and that more genetic mixing leads to more diverse people, and less genetic mixing leads to the Hapsburgs. To my credit, that particular night I was completely unprepared to get into such a political debate. You know, the kind that spirals so completely and immediately out of control that it ends up in racist drivel. And the worst part about all of it is that this guy thinks he's forward-thinking. He thinks he's really well informed on all the hot-button socio-political issues, and he's out there, talking to people, making decisions, filling the collective unconscious with his burbling, bumbling ethos.
What I'm really saying here is that they're out there. Those people exist, and they are out there, and they are at the bar, waiting for you to get tipsy so they can babble at you for four hours straight when you where just trying to have a nice night out with your friend. It's real, girls.
Brace yourselves.
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