Lesbian Carebears Making a Difference My daughter’s friend was over this afternoon, excitedly anticipating a sudden OK from her family to purchase a pet guinea pig (about which our daughter is an expert), when a stuffed animal fight began in our youngest son’s bedroom. A stuffed animal fight is a fun way to spend a rainy afternoon—though this was a gorgeous sunny winter day with a high of 40 degrees—and I’m proud to say that no one was harmed in the ruckus, even the sixteen year-old brother who walked into the fray, innocently intent on nosing into whatever was in play. In the middle of the fight, our daughter picked up a tiny figure and pointed out to her friend that it was a lesbian CareBear (it had a rainbow T-shirt), and commented, “I don’t know where her partner went though…” The lesbian part didn’t faze her friend, though when our daughter pointed out the heart shaped tattoo on the bear’s bum, the friend considered it a bad influence in the household until I reminded her that I had three tattoos. Somehow she considered hidden ones (or maybe just ones inscribed on a bear’s behind) naughty, but I don’t get it. However, the topic of my tattoos reminded the friend that she was reading my book (The Brides of March: Memoir of a Same-Sex Marriage), and enjoying it, and that she’d become an advertisement for it in her literature class because she couldn’t stop laughing while reading it at one point and was causing a distraction in class. When someone is a distraction, she told us, they must stand up and explain why they are diverting attention away from the topic at hand (which was silent reading at that moment) so she’d stood up and told the class about my book and told them all that they should buy it when several told her they wanted to borrow it. “Really?” I asked her. “Really,” she told me. Moreover, now there are several kids in her 7th grade class who are reading it, and she overheard one extremely Christian boy fighting with his mother about it outside the school recently. My daughter’s friend retells it as “she was telling him he shouldn’t have it” and “he was telling her she should read it and she’d know there wasn’t anything wrong with it”--meaning same-sex marriage. Aren’t kids cool and amazing? And then the girls went guinea pig shopping together and came home with a blonde boar. Lesbian Carebears and same-sex marriage propaganda in 7th Grade, it doesn’t get much better than that.