Today few members of the LGBTQ community make that struggle for Justice and Equality so visible. Recognizing Chelsea Manning as Grand Marshall links us to our past and reminds us of how far we’ve come as well as how far we have to go.
No one, and I mean no one, is telling progressive voters that we need to ding in hard and start fighting and don’t stop fighting until the 2016 election is over. We need to see progressive wins in 2014 and a again in 2016, or we may just count our democracy as dead.
Like the Creationists, those who reject Marriage Equality because they believe “traditional marriage” is better for raising healthy children are being forced further and further into the fringe and their ideas seen as fallacious. This is essential so that a final legal/judicial ruling to grant Marriage Equality across the whole of the United States happens based on sound Science and a firm standing in the Constitution. Both will be needed for Marriage Equality to be permanent.
That males are treated as if they have a license to use their power over another human being and to invade and harm them in the most horrific way, is unconscionable in a society that claims to value freedom and equality.
As we look towards the upcoming draft and what will happen with Michael Sam, we now see the NFL as well as their Arizona franchise speak out against the AZ anti-gay discrimination law.
We must never stop demanding our legal rights and full equality, yet we must also continue to strive for full acceptance culturally, in our neighborhoods, in the cities and towns where we live, our, our schools, our places of employment and everywhere we go. There are no places where bigotry can be acceptable if real equality is to be ours.
Racism, homophobia, misogyny, and a host of other examples where a group treats another group as if they are less than are all aspects of the same sense of privilege. When violence, threats and intimidation get connected, it is bullying an aggression, and we must all speak up and stop this type of aggressions.
But bloggers and writers have no excuses. We have a responsibility to make sure that what we write is accurate and helps rather than harm. We don’t get to plead for more time.
Schlafly is on record claiming Hispanics are not like the GOP, because of illegitimate pregnancies and an inability to understand the Bill of Rights. She divides people into groups: the GOP and Hispanics and then demarcates how that are different but from a single vantage point, a place of white privilege. She doesn’t examine sexual behavior in both groups but begins with the assumption that the othered group is different and less than.
The error with marriage as identity politics is that we, the gay and lesbian community don’t own it. It isn’t our fight to fight nor we, the only who benefit. It is the continuation of a long line of struggles for real equality- a part of a continuum rather than an isolated effort.