A few posts down I railed against the current and growing practice of holding separate graduations for minorities of all kinds because I believe that any exclusionary event runs counter to the spirit of America. Most prominent among these ceremonies are the so-called “lavender” graduation for gays and lesbians.

If you go to the “Essays” category of this blog you’ll read my clear feelings about homosexuality. I firmly believe it is mostly genetic and these people are not making deliberate choices to be what they are. In other words, it isn’t a sin. No more a sin than being born with Down syndrome or four fingers on one hand.

I’m still against anything that tends to segregate us from each other. Miss Black America and television shows that include only members of their minority is, in my view, unacceptable. That was my initial objection to these set-aside graduations. And when I made this objection known to the daughter of my best friend, Diane M., a woman who has also become one of my most valued friends herself, she informed me that she had attended the lavender graduation at Duke.

Diane is an excellent therapist and many of her clients happen to be either gay or lesbian. She has told me of the appaling treatment these gay students receive from yahoos on the Duke campus. They are called names, marginalized and isolated by others. The graduation ceremony, she explained, is a way for them to affirm their accomplishments and the nature of their existence.

There is no excuse for any group to be treated in this manner and if it takes a separate graduation ceremony to help undo some of the psychological damage four years on a hostile campus, so be it. But we must not institutionalize these separate occasions so that they become the response to other ills in the society. Two wrongs and all that. The goal, then, becomes to work to reverse attitudes that made such a ceremony needed in the first place.

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