Aaron Hartzler wrote a beautiful piece for Salon about coming out to—and breaking away from—his deeply religious and just-as-deeply homophobic parents:

Several years later, when I finally came out, Mom broke her silence on the subject. “It would be easier to go to your funeral than to know you are going to spend the night with that man.” This was the fevered pitch of the bullying, the loudest it ever became. Since then, the noise has subsided along with any meaningful communication between us, buried beneath the shallow serifs of her email italics — cheerful updates about the weather in places I’ve never lived, and people I’ve never met, at churches I’ll never attend.

Growing up means learning to hold two opposing views about the same thing. It’s not that I’ve stopped loving Mom and Dad—I haven’t. It’s just that I’ve accepted the fact that they may be as powerless as I am to change. Turns out unconditional love is a two-way street, so I protect myself with a few well-placed guardrails—one of which is the relative distance of communicating with Mom mainly by text and email.

Go read the whole thing.