WHAT?
So not only would this contradict ebvery amendment made, including the bill of rights, but essentially paves the ways to strip homosexuals of their human rights in the future in this country. Drastic you might say? BUt look at how slowly our first amendment rights have been stripped away over the last 6 years through the politics of making us not only afraid to speak our minds freely but to inform ourselves of the outside world. (You need no bigger example of this than a recent Henry Rollins story I heard where he was pulled aside for a simple BOOK he was reading to inform him more on the state of terrorism in our world. And while true it was in Australia where he was confronted, they are in this state of fear following what America has thrown out there. All this and at least in Australia they confront you and ask you about what your reading. In the good old U.S.A they'd simply keep a file on you until they had enough info to simply McCarthy your ass into jail......but I digress.) YOur saying what does all this have to do with anything? Well, our government has found that the fear campaign has worked so well against the "war" on terrorism, that they are adopting it towards their other agendas as well.
"Homosexuals threaten the normal american lifestyle." These are the phrases they use. Idiots like Rick Santorum would have you believe that homsexuals are proliferating the good wholesomeness of our country. I say fuck that.
The reason our country is like that is because it's afraid of the word sex and anything conencted to it. And as a result we become, as I've stated earlier, the laughing state of the united states. It always comes back to sex.
Most people don't want to see peopel displaying their affection for each other out in public. I know I don't, be it straight ot gay. This doesn't make it an obscene act or something dirty. It simply makes it something I don't need to see. The sacrity of what happens between you and another person and how you show that to each other it between you too. IT doesn't mean that we can't be EDUCATED on this stuff in the right enviornment, nor does it mean it can't be talked about or discussed, but it doesn't need to be demonstrated. And really this is why people laugh at us as a country, and until we get over these pre-occupations and problems with sexuality that we will never been seen as anything more than giggling 14 yearolds in the school yard.
Because we refuse to accept homosexuality as something that exists in our society, the only option we give people that we ignore is to force us to see that they are there. Homosexuality is not going away, it's not a phase, it's not an anomoly. It exists and people still ignore it as if it will go away if they do.
Because we can't deal with the reality that for some people, the person of their same sex is who theya re attracted to. And what more, we expect them to understand our heterosexual attractions as if it's not as foreign a concept to them as homsoexulaity might be to us. (What's worse is at the edn of the day it's not that hard to understand. Some guys are attracted to other guys, just like some men are attracted to women exclusivly with big breasts and large booties. I don't see what the big deal is. Anyways...)
So, this leeds to the argument of what causes homosexuality. Because if it's a choice...blah blah blah...deviant behavior...blah blah blah. I am firmly of the belief that it is fully genetic, and while there's no absolute evidence as of yet, genetticists are getting closer and closer to solving this puzzle. SO if homosexulaity is then genetic, you CAN'T change it. IT exists and we have to accept it as something that exists. I am one to believe that given a choice between a life of acceptence and relative ease and a life of hatred and harshness, one would opt for the former and not the latter, unless you were a sado-masichist. So why would someone choose to be gay, if life would be so much easier if they were staright.
But really it runs even deeper than this. Because you can't ask someone to change what they are inside. Some people consider it sacrilegde to compare the civil rights movement to gay rights, but how is it any different. Being the child of mixed races, I've felt prejudice and racisim my entire life, uniquely from black and white people. I see my struggle (to which, at 30 years of age, at least sitting in my apartment in Cambridge, I can say there have been stides made in the last thirty years....) not much different than hat of homosexuals to be accepted.
Because we as a society are so upfuckingtight about sexuality, we can't just let it go. Homosexual people are just like us. making them no less capabable of having a normal family, raising children , having menaingful realtionships and staying married more consistently then staright people can in this day and age. Homosexuals aren't pedophiles or sexual deviants, there people who are attracted to people of the same se. And for as much as people say they don't care what people do in their wbedrooms, there are a whole lot of 'Buts' generally associated to those types of statements. And those same people who say sexuality should be an issue, make it an issue. It's the same old politician double speak we hear from everything from the Iraq war to the price of gas in our country.
The best part of the word homophobia is the entymology of the word...literally meaning "The fear of gays." The great thing about fears is that they can be overcome with understanding. I'm not saying we will evr understand what it is to be gay, just as a man will never know what it's lie to be a womana or a caucasian will never know what it is to be a african american or vise versa. But we can understand and sympathisize with where any person different is going through. How hard is that to fucking undertsand? How hard is it to have empathy for another set of people? We had it for all the people who died on 9/11 and as a result of the gross mis-mamangement that went on in New Orleans.
Unfortunately we live in a country that's largely conceived in the mind of middle america and the religious right. And they are SO busy judging every one else and forgetting that, (not that i'm a bible thumper, but ratehr using their own logic), if you look at your own beliefs, we ALL sin. SO your sins of judging other people are no worse than the "Supposed" sins the gay people are committing. People like this are SO aftraid to look in the mirror and take account of themselves, they worry about everybody else far too much. The syaing i belive is "Lest he throw the last stone be without sin." or something like that. Well accorindg to the might writers of the bible, none of us are without sin. SO there.
We live in a country that refuses to take action on soemthing until unneccesary things happen. Mathew Sheppard had to die before we culd look at gay's civil rights as an issue thata ctually had to be addressed. And even then has anything really been done, aside from a little attention and people saying "well, he was living in sin."
Judge lest you be judged yourself.
The saddest thing is that we even have to make these disticntions at all (no less four seperate times in our own Constitution already (the actually document it self, the 14th amendment, 15th amendment, and the 19th amendment) whent he document itself is clear enough already. Essentially this amendment, if ever passed (this is the second time it's been attempted within the last six times and it will probably be attemtped a couple more times before King George is out of office) will start a slippery slope towards a sort of cultural apartheid in our country. And it's not a slope easliy climbed back up.
It's time to stop being the epople who stand by while this fight goe on in front of us. It's time for us to stand up and say something. And all it takes is to say "This is rdiculous. I'm not going to stand for one more person in this country to be treated as less than a person." All it takes is one word, that we've grown increasingly and disturbingly more accustomed to saying in our complacentcy. The same kind of complacentcy that allowed a person like Matthew Sheppard to be murdered.
No.
Currently listening :
Radioactivist
By Red Tape
Release date: By 10 February, 2004
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