Astonishment and Gaping Reality

I was utterly shocked about a week ago. You see, I was sitting in a hot tub with several of my cousins. We were all joking around, poking fun at my younger boy cousin, as he refused rather blatantly to divulge anything about his first girlfriend. We all found the relationship adorable. We began to talk about his ideal girlfriend, attempting to make him reveal something. One of them ended up saying something like this "We don't really care what you say, we're fine with it all, its not like we are going to get mad about whoever this girl is." I said "or boy," quite lightly, as if it was a boy, i would be fine with that. The hot tub gets completely silent for a millisecond and one of my cousins bursts out "Don't tell him its okay to be gay!" Everyone else nodded in agreement with her. I had no idea what to say, was it truly possible that they were this prejudiced? Of course, my explanation came as the fact they are Catholic. I felt kind of insulted, as several of my friends are gay. So, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind, that being "WHAT?" They all looked at me like I was crazy. "Its fine to be gay!" I protested. The rebuttal; "No its not!" After that, I stood up and left, reeling from my experience. I had been under a crazy impression up until that point that the younger generation, my generation, was accepting of everyone, at least more than our predecessors. Whether they were black or white, gay or straight. I woke up from that bit of pretense. Although a few of us are accepting, perhaps our generation is just as prejudiced as the one before us, if not worse. I hope to be proven wrong some day.