Parenting & Family Quote by Anna Quindlen

Quindlen’s line works because it yanks “gay people” out of the abstract and deposits them at the family dinner table. The sentence is built like a warning label: not a moral lecture about tolerance, but a practical caution about consequences. “Should be aware” carries the cool authority of a columnist who’s seen the damage up close; it suggests parents aren’t monsters, just dangerously unreflective. Then she tightens the screw with repetition: “mocking or cursing,” “mocking or cursing.” The echo mimics how casual slurs get rehearsed in a home, becoming atmosphere.

The intent is surgical: force a shift from ideological posturing to parental responsibility. Quindlen doesn’t ask parents to love strangers; she asks them to notice the odds that the stranger is theirs. That’s the subtextual gambit, and it’s shrewd because it uses the strongest lever in American culture - family loyalty - to counteract prejudice that often masquerades as “values.”

Context matters. Quindlen’s journalism and commentary rose in an era when gay rights debates were routinely framed as culture-war abstractions: “lifestyle,” “agenda,” “them.” Her sentence punctures that distancing. It also acknowledges a grim reality: many queer kids learn first to fear their own homes, not the outside world, because ridicule and condemnation arrive early, disguised as jokes or righteousness.

The line’s quiet sting is that it refuses parents the comfort of thinking harm is hypothetical. If you curse “them,” you might be cursing the child listening from the hallway.