One Big American Family ... Someday

Frank Ricchiazzi grew up in a Buffalo neighborhood where, if you weren’t Sicilian, people looked at you funny. As a boy, he thought non-Sicilians were foreigners. He remembers a young uncle bringing home a girl to meet the family who, egad, wasn’t Sicilian. Or Italian. She wasn’t even Roman Catholic.

Ricchiazzi, 58, laughs while telling the story. Good thing everyone was so understanding, because when Ricchiazzi was in his 20s, he had a surprise of his own for the family: He was gay.

“When they found out,” he says from his Laguna Beach home, “it didn’t make a difference, because I was family. I was blood, and they were welcoming my partner like they would welcome anyone in the family who was happy to be bringing home their partner.”

He’s using the story as a reference for how he thinks the American family will someday accept gay marriage. Not today, not next month, but someday.

What could be more topical now that President Bush has announced support for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as being between one man and one woman, effectively banning same-sex marriages?

That’s why I wanted to talk to Ricchiazzi, given that he helped found both the national and local chapters of the Log Cabin Club, a group of politically moderate-to-conservative gays that likes the president. What I wanted Ricchiazzi to tell me, for starters, is whether gay marriage -- which some conservatives consider anathema to their social values -- is of crucial importance to him.

“Not for me, as an individual who has had a partner for 16 years,” he says, “but for the gay people who have children. People who talk about family, the first thing is children. With a gay couple, by that couple not being recognized [in a legal sense], it’s saying to those children, ‘You come from an illegitimate home.’ ”

He also points out that one parent can receive Social Security benefits after the other dies -- money that can be important to help raise children -- only if they were married.

But it’s precisely that image of gays raising children that appalls conservatives, I tell him.

“The reality is there are hundreds of thousands of kids in same-sex homes in this country,” he says.

Still, Ricchiazzi wouldn’t have put gay marriage on the 2004 agenda. He prefers a slower approach that starts with civil unions. Besides, he says, more pressing work needs to be done in states that don’t fully protect gays and lesbians on housing or employment matters. He thinks those on the “left of the gay community” are “selfish” in pushing the gay-marriage issue.

“There’s a part of me that says, no, I really wish it wouldn’t be there on the national agenda,” Ricchiazzi says, “but another part that says it is dialogue and conversation that makes people begin to think a little more and say, ‘Whoa, I never thought about it that way.’ ”

He has another theory: namely, that the president doesn’t have his heart in the constitutional amendment and is merely appeasing the most socially conservative wing of the party by backing it. He likens the situation to Ronald Reagan’s railing about abortion but not leading a legal fight against it during his presidency.

Acceptance of social change, he says, “is a process we go through, a human process.” Step by step, he suggests, just like in the old neighborhood.

“The American people want equality for everybody,” he says. “The overwhelming majority of the American people want everyone on an equal playing field, and it’s that American philosophy that, once a discussion opens up and they see that people are not being allowed to be on the same playing field, they’ll begin to say, ‘Whoa, that’s wrong.’ ”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.