My two freinds, the racist and the homophobe

Momma always said, “Be careful who your friends are.”
I know a couple of people over forty whom I consider friends. One is white, one is black. One is male, one is female. One is racist, one is homophobic. Now before you get yourself all worked up, let me explain.
I meet a lot of people. What they do for a living, if they believe in God, who they sleep with, or how they vote is never a concern of mine. As long as they treat me with respect, we can get along.
Take the white guy I know. He keeps it no secret that if his daughter were ever to date a black man, he would disown her. That’s not a problem for me. I don’t want his daughter, nor do either of my two sons. His rationale is that black guys, especially those his daughter’s age, have no desire to be anything other than thugs, rappers, or drug dealers. But get this. His biggest concern is what his interracial grandbaby would have to endure from other children. The classic ignorant reply.
I’m a product of mixed race intercourse. The only problems I ever had came from ignorant adults, both black and white. Older blacks knew no shame when they would remind me that “somebody in your family was the Mastah’s favorite.” It was always a white adult that would let me know that, “you're still a nigger.” It’s adults like my buddy who produce offspring and teach them to have a problem with other children different than themselves.
Take my black female buddy. She is a staunch supporter of equal rights and reparations. She is educated and has traveled the world extensively. She has seen injustice and discrimination. She is just as adamant an opponent of same-sex marriages. She is so against the “immorality” of homosexuality that she wouldn’t want a gay teacher to teach her son.
How a gay teacher would teach her son anything different than two plus two equals four is beyond me. When offered that she sounded like the pre-civil rights era racists who didn’t want blacks to have the same rights as whites, she was taken aback. She was offended that I would compare her to white people who thought their lifestyle was superior and more blessed by God than that of black people. She believes God made man and woman to marry and that gays will bring negativity into the institution of marriage. As if spousal abuse and divorce in heterosexual marriages ain’t negative! I pointed out that folks used God to sanction slavery, too.
Although she knows my marital status and the number of children I have, she questioned if my support of gay rights was due to “borderline” sexuality. When I said she sounded like whites who accused other whites who worked on the Underground Railroad of being niggers, she disagreed.
I was left pondering how in this century two seemingly intelligent people could sound like Strom Thurmond in 1948 when he said there were “not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”
Strom Thurmond died in 2003. Ignorance lives on.