What does my bedroom have to do with anything?

I am so tired of listening to the religious right argue that what goes on my bedroom justifies their attacks on my personal freedom and the right to be treated like every other American. What exactly is it about my life that is so scary to them? I mean, do they think that I lay around naked all day long having sex and trying to think of ways to turn little heterosexuals into gays or lesbians? Get real.

I’m a travel nurse. I work away from my home for months at a time. I do this to try and build a life and financial freedom with the person that I love, who happens to be a woman. I work in Emergency departments from California to New York, and have had to trade being at home with my family for making a living that can pull us up into the middle class. My partner is a police officer. She spends her time at work protecting the people that live in our community and risking her life to do it.

Our intimate times consist of conversations on the telephone for the most part, and then two or three times a year we get to spend a few weeks together. Even then, she’s working and I’m either working locally or preparing to leave on assignment again. We pass each other in the hallway between shifts, and when we’re lucky, we may actually catch an hour or two to sit on the couch and watch a movie or even talk face to face. When we do get to actually occupy the bed at the same time, we’re usually too tired to do anything other than sleep.
On the rare occasion when we do manage to have a sexually intimate moment, it’s behind closed doors and not at all like they make it look in heterosexual porn movies, which by the way seem obsessed with lesbian sex. We work hard. We pay taxes. We support our community. We watch out for our neighbors. So when the religious right says that we don’t have the right to have our relationship protected and respected the same as theirs, what does my bedroom have to do with it? If you ask me, they’re the ones who are obsessed with my sex life, not me. Why is that? I mean, honestly, I couldn’t care less what Falwell or Dobson do in their bedrooms. I don’t even want to know. Let’s face it, Jim Baker’s and Jimmy Swaggart’s sexual escapades were way more information than I needed in my busy life.