Proud (Pride?)

It will doubtless surprise nobody (given all my posts here about my family and soccer) that we all sat down together last night after dinner to watch the American women play Japan for the World Cup.  Amazing, spectacular game and all props to Carli Lloyd for her record-smashing hat-trick performance.  All props to every other woman on the team, too--it's a group sport, after all.  We yelled ourselves absolutely hoarse cheering.

But one of the best parts of the night for me?  Watching Abby Wambach kiss her wife in joy after the game.  I'm about as straight as they come, and in general, I don't want to watch anyone's PDA, gay or straight (guess you could call me an equal opportunity "get-a-room"er) but at that moment I was suddenly proud to live in a country where it's OK to kiss your same-sex spouse on national television.  By contrast to, say, Nigeria, whose head coach Eucharia Uche has been accused of driving homosexual players off her nation's team.  Or either Russia or Qatar, the controversial host nation-awardees of the 2018 and 2022 men's World Cups, both of which are blatantly discriminatory and anti-gay.  Not like we don't still have a lot of work to do as a nation on this, either, but it's good that the times are changing.

As a biologist, I've seen more than enough evidence to convince me that homosexuality is a genetic thing, not a "choice" in the traditional sense of the word.  Hopefully, one day, the gender of somebody's partner will be a total nonissue.  And in the meantime, on this Independence Day weekend, I'm glad to be American.

(Oh, and you idiots who are tweeting about the win over Japan being some sort of retribution for Pearl Harbor??  Get back under your rocks where you belong.  NOW.)