Remember Zach Wahls? The University of Iowa student with two moms shot to fame in February after testifying at an Iowa House hearing about a bill that would ban marriage for same-sex couples. He’s since spoken with Ellen and the Human Rights Campaign, among others.
This month, he’s profiled in Lambda Legal’s Impact newsletter (PDF file)—and it’s worth a read. He writes, in part:
I was in elementary school, first or second grade, when a friend told me, “My dad says we can’t be friends anymore.” And it was just because my parents were gay. It wasn’t even the kid’s idea. . . .
It’s hard to tell a kid that his family is different, because you don’t really have anything to compare it to. It’s just a fact of life. It seemed natural to all the kids I knew, unless they had been very specifically instructed that there was something wrong and abhorrent about a gay couple.
At the same time, he says, having same-sex parents was not the most challenging part of his childhood:
It was that I broke my leg when I was three and I spent two years re-learning how to walk. It was that my mom Terry was diagnosed with secondary MS when I was 14 and I spent most of high school watching her go from a former world-class athlete to wheelchair dependence.
Quoting Muhammad Ali, he concludes, “Impossible is nothing.”