Gay Rights = Civil Rights

Back in 2001, a friend and co-worker of mine who was gay told me something that, for some reason, greatly affected me. I had just begun dating the woman who would become my wife (and, of course, ex-wife) and mother of my children. She was black, and I was white. This got us a few glances here and there, and maybe an occasional dumb rude remark, but nothing serious, and certainly nothing like what it would have been forty years before.

What the co-worker said was, "I long for a day when I can walk hand in hand with my boyfriend through Times Square and not have people shouting nasty things at me from car windows and buses, the way you can now with your girlfriend."

What he had effectively done in my mind was link gay rights to the civil rights movement. While I had been supportive of gay rights for as long as I knew of such a movement, I had never had a real personal connection to gay rights as an issue. I considered it important, but saw it as something distant from me. I knew plenty of gay people and sympathized, but I didn't feel personally affected by the issue. His simple statement changed that. It equated gay rights with previous struggles that had resulted in changes with a direct impact on me. It helped me to see that the struggle for gay rights is a struggle for human rights.

There aren't many things that can make my blood boil. I'm a pretty mellow guy, and I try to be accepting of all kinds of views. But I was watching TV the other day (which is an incredibly rare event in itself), and this ad came on - I've blocked most of it out, I think, but it actually got me mad. It was people complaining about their kids' schools telling the kids that gay marriage is okay and what not, and in the end it said that "a rainbow coalition" of people of all races and colors is coming together to stop that sort of thing.

Here are these intolerant people promoting their intolerant views and trying to use the language of tolerance to do it. Man, that really got to me. For one, no one is stopping any churches from saying what they want about gays. They're constitutionally protected, just like the KKK is constitutionally protected and can spew its own idiotic hate all it wants, as long as it doesn't hurt or incite violence. The most that will happen is that tax-supported groups won't be able to be intolerant towards gays the way they've been able to in the past, just like they can't be intolerant towards people due to ethnicity or gender like they were in the past. They won't be able to support that stuff with tax money.

People need to learn to understand that human beings don't really fit into the neat little categories they've had assigned to them. There are not simply "men" and "women". There are all kinds of people who possess all kinds of traits that can fall anywhere along the gender continuum. Some people feel that they were born with the incorrect sex organs, and they try their best to correct that by dressing and behaving as they see those of the gender they believe themselves to be do. People laugh, but do you know how terrifying it can be for those people? How difficult it can be?

So some will say that the solution is for such transgendered individuals to get counseling to learn to accept themselves as they are. But, to my mind, it would be much better if society changed its way of thinking so that it accepted them as they are, which is as transgendered people.

Of course, I started writing about gay rights and now I'm talking about transgendered people. That's what happens when you're prone to thinking divergently, I guess. But the issues are related, if not quite the same. Not all transgendered people are gay, and certainly most gay people are not transgendered. But both bring to the forefront the discomfort we as a society have with the idea of sexual identity and attraction. On a societal level, we have a hard time with these things because our social mentality is not wired to deal with them.

Acceptance of other people is a wonderful feeling. Standing next to others and realizing that you have far more in common with them than you may have thought is great. When you cut through the fear and the discomfort, you find that people are just people, and all should be treated with respect for what they are.