A supportive uncle has offered to walk his lesbian niece down the aisle at her wedding because his brother — who is also the woman’s conservative Christian father — doesn’t want to.
Now, the man’s brother has gotten upset about the uncle’s offer and has accused the uncle of “undermining” the daughter and dad’s relationship.
The entire situation compelled the uncle to go to ask for perspectives on the “Am I the A**hole?” group on the bulletin board social network Reddit.
In his Reddit post, the uncle (going by the screenname ConcernEquivalent744) wrote that his 43-year-old brother married a woman from a conservative Christian church and “pretty much drank their flavor-aid” afterward.
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His brother’s daughter eventually came out as a lesbian at age 17. Rejected by her family, the then-teenage girl came to live with her grandparents for the rest of her high school career. They even paid for her college.
“I tried to be a safe space for her, because she’s a great kid with a bright future ahead of her and her now-fiance is basically already my other niece,” ConcernEquivalent744 wrote.
The now 25-year-old woman has reconnected with her father and his wife. They have attended family therapy and the dad and his wife are “getting over their dumb fairy tale hangups over her being gay,” the uncle wrote.
The 25-year-old woman is getting married in six months and she wants her parents to attend the ceremony. Her parents, however, say they still have a “mental block” about the wedding and have asked her to postpone her wedding date to give them more time to adjust to the idea of her being married to another woman.
“When she told me this I told her straight up that that’s bulls**t and if my brother and sister-in-law are too wrapped up in their own Jesussy Christiness to watch their daughter marry the love of her life, I’ll walk her down the aisle instead,” ConcernEquivalent744 wrote.
After learning of his offer, the man’s brother “showed up in a huff and demanded to know where I got off undermining his relationship with his daughter.” The father said that it was his “right” to “give” his own daughter “away,” the uncle wrote.
The uncle told the father, “I’d be doing a pretty piss-poor job of doing that if I took my braindead homophobe brother’s side over my niece’s.” He also added, “I don’t have to see a f**king therapist to teach me how to love my own f**king kid.”
While the uncle’s wife told the uncle that he probably could’ve handled the situation better, the uncle asked Reddit if he was being a jerk.
Overall, commenters said that the woman’s father didn’t deserve to be “handled with kid gloves”
One commenter wrote, “Bigots need it laid out in the most truthful, hurtful, disrespectful, and disgusting way. So they know how truly terrible they’re being. Bigots like these ones think god created everyone equally unless you’re not in their image. Like that’s truly f**king disgusting.”
Another commenter wrote, “Maybe this verbal slap in the face that holds up a mirror to their actual repugnant behavior is actually what the brother needs.”
Another said, “Your brother already ‘gave his daughter away’ at 17 when she went to live with her grandparents.”
Someone else added, “We as humans do not live long lives. It is beyond absurd to ask for over 8 years time, of all things, to ‘adjust’ one’s mindset so that they can be a tolerable presence around their daughter and their daughter’s motherf**king fiancé on the day of her wedding.”
In a later response, the uncle wrote that stepping in for his niece’s father “has been a bit of a running theme” throughout her adult life.
“When it was parents’ weekend her freshman year and my wife and I visited her… everyone assumed I was her dad (we’re identical). She was in an emotional place where [she] didn’t bother to correct them,” he wrote.
