When Love and Truth Collide

I hear the pain in your message. This hurts me too. But I also need to speak plainly about why I've drawn the lines I have. I don’t want us to be at odds or feel a chasm between us, but I also can’t pretend that what’s happening in this country — and in our family — isn’t a moral emergency.

You said you’re sad that my position is so ‘stringent’, and that it feels like the bridge only goes one way. But I need to reiterate: this isn’t just a disagreement. And I’m not demanding agreement on everything. I’m asking whether we — as a family — can acknowledge the reality of a movement that is openly hostile to people like me, like Rodenel, and like many of our friends. A movement that is dismantling the American republic before our eyes. And whether we’re willing to seek the truth about what’s happening — to discern right from wrong, good from evil, fact from fiction.

It may feel like I’m the one causing the rift, but that framing is unfair. The divide was already there — in silence, in denial, in the choice to look away. I didn’t create it. I stopped pretending everything was fine because it wasn’t. Now I’m asking others to stop, too. I need you to see that not as rejection, but as a moral reckoning that was long overdue.

I’ve watched this regime detain immigrants — many with legal status — and send them to torture prisons in El Salvador. I’ve seen people whisked off the street by plainclothes ICE agents, like thugs in Russia. I’ve seen US citizens detained without cause, and the president openly float sending them to a foreign gulag. I’ve heard people in our family echo talking points from the very machine doing this.

I’m hearing the refrain ‘due process is only for citizens’. That phrase chilled me to the bone. It’s the darkest thing I’ve ever heard in American political discourse — and the fact that it’s working on people terrifies me. That is the language of authoritarianism.

You’ve said you don’t understand how I could cut off family. But you made that call yourself when your brother betrayed the family after Papa died. You saw the manipulation, the slander, the hypocrisy, the treachery — and you drew a line. You felt it. You acted. You protected what mattered.

This is no different — except the betrayal I’m responding to isn’t just personal. It’s structural. It’s a threat to democracy, to civil rights, to basic humanity. I’m doing what you taught me to do: draw the line when someone crosses it.

You also said no one laid out conditions when I came out and brought Rodenel into our lives. And you’re right — your love and acceptance during that time meant the world to me!

But I need you to hear something clearly:

That is not the same thing as me accepting people who support or excuse a movement that actively seeks to harm us. Being gay — marrying an immigrant — these aren’t political stances. They’re part of who I am. What I lived through. And it’s from a place of love and acceptance.

For five years, Rodenel and I lived apart — not by choice, but because I had no legal way to bring him here. Our love wasn’t recognized. My government denied me the rights every straight citizen took for granted. It wasn’t until the Windsor decision that I could sponsor him, and not until Obergefell that our marriage was equal in all 50 states.

So when someone supports a political movement that wants to roll that back, or deport immigrants with no due process, or punish trans kids — that’s not a mere difference of opinion. That’s a direct threat to my life, my marriage, and the values this country is supposed to stand for.

There is no moral equivalence between my identity and someone else’s chosen allegiance to a fascist movement of cruelty and fear. Acceptance of me can’t just be words — it has to show up in what you support, what you challenge, and what you’re willing to break with.

Part of why I’ve drawn this boundary is, yes, for self-protection — but also because I need my family to feel a fraction of what I’ve felt. Not to punish — but to make it real. I’ve tried to explain it calmly for years, and I wasn’t heard. Now we have crossed a red line, and I cannot be silent or excuse complicity. The stakes are too high.

I also want to challenge an idea that I think quietly shapes how you see this — that what’s happening is just political ‘disagreement’, or that we’re equally caught in a culture war. I know it feels like everyone is fighting, and I know you hate what that’s doing to the country and our family. But that ‘both-sides’ framing erases the fact that one side is spreading lies, dismantling institutions, and targeting vulnerable people — while the other is trying to stop it. This isn’t a symmetrical conflict, and it’s not just ‘politics as usual’. These are dangerous times.

I’ve also hoped — and still hope — that you could help bring the rest of the family forward. That you wouldn’t just quietly re-evaluate your views, but actively model what it means to educate yourself, to question what you hear, to apply critical thinking, and to seek truth over comfort.

If you’re on this journey, I need you not just to walk it quietly — I need you to speak up. Not just for me, but for everyone who doesn’t get heard. Be the one who shows it’s possible to change. To grow. To say: ‘I got this wrong, and now I know better.’

And I want to be clear about something else, too: I’m not expecting perfection of anyone. That’s not the point. What matters is the willingness to try — to reflect, to learn, to correct when needed. To listen when someone says, ‘This hurts me.’ To ask, ‘What am I standing for? Who might I be hurting, even unintentionally?’ That effort — even when it’s messy — is what builds trust and shows real love.

I love you — all of you — and that hasn’t changed.

But love, if it means anything, must be rooted in truth and in action. And right now, I need help carrying that truth. I hope you’ll join me in it.