(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
I am straight and my gay culture/history knowledge is limited to a few childhood friends who were gay, going to a few gay pride parades because the parties afterward were excellent, I know who Harvey Milk is and I know about Stonewall.
But I just can’t give progressives a pass on this one. I can’t. I can’t tell gay/lesbian/transgendered Americans to “wait and be patient” and explain to them that their rights are not a priority. I do not know what it is like to face the hatred and oppression that gay Americans and those across the world who are gay must face.
For how long are gay Americans supposed to be patient? For how long should straight folks expect them to support other priorities on the progressive mystical agenda while getting nothing in return? For how long are gay Americans expected to be “reasonable” with their demands? For how long are they supposed to pretend that inequality is alright as long as we (the straight folks) “accept” them? Do we think that is all gays want? Do we think gays are just happy not to get beat up every five minutes ( which really still happens )as a measure of our so called “toleration and progress”. Progressive hesitation is starting to sound like liberal racism ” oh I have a black/gay/person who is different friend” therefore I pass the “test.” And yes, I have trotted out my black friends in stories to prove I am somehow “less racist” than other Americans.
The only good thing about the proposition in Arkansas that prevents unmarried people from being adoptive or foster parents is that it hits straight people and gay people hard. Maybe it will make the straight folks go hmmmmmmm. Or not, I don’t know.
I do know this: I am sorry. Gays and transgendered folks are Americans, they work, they play, they have hopes and fears, and children, and dogs, and cats and parrots, they like sports or hate them, they pay taxes, some might even like hockey. They are us and we are them. Americans have liberty or equality or they don’t. Until the gay and transgendered community can adopt, foster, marry, and get benefits without having to fight court battles we are not all equal. We cannot all pursue the right to happiness and we are not this great and wonderful nation. We are less than what we could be and we are settling for less than what we could be. We say we want change but we want the gay and transgendered community to wait and be nice an accept assurances and be placated. We don’t want them to get angry at us, the straight folks.
At this point I want to just ban marriage. Fuck it. Seriously. Or turn it back over to the churches and watch straight people get enraged because they don’t qualify for some obscure reason due to church teachings. Straight people need to feel the fire on this one and they don’t and that is the problem.
And it makes me feel helpless and very pissed off.
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with their demands for equal human and civil rights.
Every gay person I know is human.
They are entitled to and should be demanding and should be enjoying equal rights now, and the support of everyone else in that quest. Yesterday, in fact. Last week. Last year. 10 years ago. 100 years ago.
Longer.
Maybe anyone who thinks they should wait should relinquish his or her rights, while gays wait?
… have increased:
Maybe we should have some GLBT websites on our blogroll … and I’d appreciate any suggestions as to which are the best ones.
This is the sort of thing someone like me could not write, even though (which people seem to forget) I lived as a straight guy for 44 years.
Even asking for people to pick up the mantel gets me attacked.
we should recognize is that working for the acceptance of gay marriage is just one of the ways to work on equal rights for gays. I know its an important one, but just as there were many different fronts on which the legal battles were fought in the Civil Rights movement, there are many fronts on which to fight this battle – even some that are not legal in nature.
i am sad and probably now going to be quite whiny because this looks like a great blog with active comments and my forehead is burning up and i need to go to bed and by the time i get back to read and comment you’ll all be gone.
please solve the problem about people not accepting gay people , you know, “allowing” them equal rights and stuff. okay? please? because that lack of acceptance is a stain on this country’s collective soul.
from my perspective, these civil rights belong to all of us. the underlying issue of blatantly legislating the bible, especially under Bush, must be STOPPED.
the state, as far as i can tell, has absolutely NOTHING to gain, no viable vested interest in the decisions of its citizens to partner in different or same sex unions. or to stay single.
part of the fight is also to stop segmenting out parts of the population. stop that shit. and enforce civil rights across the fucking board. and stop cold the religious agenda fueling it before it strangles completely our freedoms (or what is left of them).
a religious agenda that those big wig politicians promote but have no intention to either live by or allow it to truly control the country. because. hey, that’s their job, no?
oh. wait. we had an election that refuted their control… i’m babbling because it’s late here… or early.
…which have been much on my mind…are Cali props 5 and 9.
All us queer folks are out in the world to yell. People in prison have no farkin’ voice at all. Our humanity is at least arguable to the mainstream, however divided they are. The humanity of literally millions of others is given as a nothing.
My fear is that my society is becoming unlivable. I want civil rights and I think it is important as all get out to yell my head off. But I don’t know that my particular issues are anything more than one little wedge. And if that wedge doesn’t work…pick up another one for a bit. I care a lot. I don’t think the devil is making any deals for impression management, unlike many bloggers. But, but…we’re destroying human beings at a prodigious rate, and the message that some people are disposable is not being addressed except through a bunch of little windows.
Maybe those little windows in toto shed enough light. But I am reading a lot of people in the last few days going “well, if Obama doesn’t address my issue, fuck ‘im for a centrist”. And if he is a centrist, sure. If we don’t address prisons and the social safety net, the most basic idea of the social contract, then our little windows are what we’ve got. But the level of light through my little window…is not my greatest fear or concern.
End rant. Thank you for this ucc.
I came out post-Stonewall, and things were very very bad. Harvey Milk assassinated, and his assassin getting off via the “Twinkie” defense (i.e., too much sugar made him crazy). I was ready to riot that night…but I was 3000 miles away from the riots, so I just screamed & fumed.
When you look at the demographic: a huge plurality of people under, say, 40 or 45 are in our camp. Indeed, the younger the demographic, the more likely they are to be saying, basically, “so what’s wrong with gay rights?” It’s the over-50 crowd (& especially the over-65 crowd–the Phyllis Schlafly crowd) that is overwhelmingly the problem.
My point is: things are SO much better than we could have imagined, even back in 1985 or 1990. Yes, you will get some backlash in the form of hate crimes.
But those hate crimes were happening all along. They’re just being reported more now–and more to the point, they are actually considered crimes now. There was a time when a gay person who got beat up for being gay would not even report it to the cops, for fear of further abuse, losing a job, etc.
Originally a means of treating women like chattel and property, ironically enough it has now become a means whereby people are held legally responsible for the way they treat each other.
But are you still getting an irony deficiency, well wait, there’s more! It tends to happen that the same ones bleating like terrified sheep about the need to “protect” the institution of marriage from homosexuality are all too often the same ones who still treat that supposedly sacred institution in their own lives like a reason to treat women like chattel.
But wait, there’s more! Getting rid of the institution of marriage would also render these neanderthals free to treat women this way without any legal recourse available for the women to defend themselves.
So my question is simply this: who, exactly, is protecting the supposedly sacred institution of marriage from heterosexual fundamentalist “Christian” men who beat their wives, blatantly cheat on them, keep them barefoot and pregnant, and won’t let them decide what to do with their own bodies even if they are raped? If there’s nothing wrong with the fundamentalist Christian heterosexual lifestyle, why does this keep happening – even in the presence of laws that are meant to supposedly prevent it from happening? Perhaps because thanks to centuries of conditioning, the women also buy into it?
A homosexual, bisexual or transgendered person is someone who has rejected mainstream societal gender roles on a molecular level. They cannot be conditioned by the same propaganda. It simply doesn’t work. Since homosexual relationships are by their very nature between the same gender the whole “WOMAN AS CHATTEL” aspect of marriage instantly becomes moot.
And if THAT, my friends, is what about marriage needs “protecting from homosexuals” in the minds of the fundamentalist Christians, I say may it die a quick and painful death.