Abriana and Josephine

A Love Story

                                                                                    Written By:     Ann Cushing Tobin

                                                                                                        Edmund Hulton

Love is unbiased

Dedication and Author’s Comments

We dedicate this book to those who understand the power of love and bear no prejudice toward same sex relationships. We also dedicate Abriana and Josephine to those who have been directly or indirectly the object of intolerance. We are deeply saddened that so much bias and hatred still exists in our society. Often, these prejudices are hidden, masked in political correctness, but still they poison thought and manifest both familiar and unrecognized injustices. We only hope, in some small way, that Abriana and Josephine’s story can bring some sanity to those whose counterfeit righteousness colors the right of who we can and cannot love.

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I have loved and been loved in my lifetime. As our lives unfold, we surround ourselves with family and friends who become a part of us. Some are with us for a lifetime and others for just a fleeting moment. I believe that we should all experience joy, happiness and especially love every day of our lives. Some feel love often, others not at all and for others it may be in their future or it has happened in their past. Regardless of race, religion or even gender I believe that there is someone out there for all of us to love and to cherish. I hope that everyone can have the opportunity to love or be loved in his or her own lifetime.

~ Ann Cushing Tobin

I have labored intensely over time to cleanse my biases. In this pursuit, I began to believe that it was hopeless. It is almost impossible to do, I decided. Bias is seeded in childhood and often fertilized via our environment. It would take a better person than me to wash away this darkness, but I was ultimately triumphant. Prejudice is in all of us you know. In the drama of this discovery, I realized that a person could only be measured by two earthly sources, first, by other people. This by nature is a humanly flawed gauge, riddled with predisposition, fad, and fear, or secondly, self-assessment. This is by far the tougher of the two since the inherent shortcomings of the first incorporate with our own self-criticisms and narcissisms often creating compounded errant predispositions. The outcomes are exceedingly flawed human beings, habitually resulting in immensely imperfect conclusions, decisions, and beliefs. How frightfully unfair, but guess what? That’s the way it is and the way it may always be.