Tag Archives: LGBT

Equal means completely equal

I applaud the 5 majority members of the US Supreme Court who today in Obergefell v Hodges voted for the rights of the GLBT community to get married in all 50 states without exception.  This is as significant a legal victory as were Brown v Board of Education, Boynton v Virginia & Loving v Virginia were in progressing our society to break down the barriers of exclusion.  I only hope that the 4 justices who voted against it are forever vilified by history for being on the wrong side of it, like George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy & Adolf Hitler.

The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution contains the treasured Equal Protection clause, which states:

“Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Equal protection for all persons means equal for all persons.  You can’t make laws that exclude certain groups simply because you don’t like them or your religion tells you that you shouldn’t.  If your religion is telling you to exclude people who otherwise wouldn’t be excluded except for the fact that they are of a different race, religion, gender, political or sexual orientation than yourself, you need to get a new religion.  You really need to get away from religion, but that’s a whole other argument.

Oregon – 1 step forward & 2 steps back

Oregon is considering adding 2 items to the ballot this year.  1 is to allow non-heterosexual couples to marry, and the other is to allow bakers, florists, caterers, or any other business to discriminate against them under religious exemptions, in effect by stating that since their religious beliefs forbid gay & lesbian marriage, then they shouldn’t be forced to do business with them due to their religious beliefs.

If I were a retailer, couldn’t I use the same law to say that I don’t want gays & lesbians in my business?  If I were a developer or landlord, couldn’t I keep them out of my properties & neighborhoods?  And could a doctor refuse to treat them if they need emergency medical services?  What about keeping slaves, since the Bible, and therefore their religion condones slavery?  Acceptance of slavery is all over the Old Testaments & appears more than once in the New Testament as well.

If slavery is an antiquated Biblical idea that we’ve overcome, how about our negativity & discrimination toward gays & lesbians?

We can’t make laws to require everyone to come together as one in our society & care at least as much for each other as we do ourselves.  Besides being a hippie Utopian dream, we raise our young to be warlike, animalistic, reptilian-brained creatures who seem to have no compassion for anything but their own needs & desires, and we look at those ideas as being non-rewarding socialism unless we give it of our own volition in dribs & drabs of charity to make ourselves feel good, but we shouldn’t be making laws that continue to separate us from each other using standards applied unequally to segments within our society.  That is the definition of discrimination in a nutshell.

It’s hard to believe that in 2014, we’re still fighting that battle.  Besides, I’ve always said that gays & lesbians have the right to get married & be as miserable as the rest of us married people.

You’re so “gay”?!?

Leave a reply

The problem with many heterosexuals (or those who outwardly act/claim to be heterosexual) is that they are simply ignorant or at least short-sighted.  They make disparaging remarks and use “gay” as an attack word against a heterosexual as slur or curse word against them, such as “that’s so gay” or “you’re so gay”, then they apologize for saying it & that’s usually the end of it without any thought as to the thought process behind this.

Keep in mind that this argument is being made by a hopelessly-hetero, married Southern male, and I’ve never had a gay experience or even a thought about it in my entire life — not that that’s wrong, as “Seinfeld” famously said; it’s just that I’m wired “straight”.  I almost wish I was gay because I get so pissed at the “team I’m playing on” (another “Seinfeld” quote) at times — does quoting “Seinfeld” make me gay?  I think it makes me intelligent more than anything, as I’m not busy watching Larry The Cable Guy, who by the way isn’t a redneck, but close — he’s from Nebraska, just another backassward Red state.

What we have to change is not just the speech, but the mindset of these idiotic people.  For example, we have pretty well banned the “n-word” from public use throughout our society unless you’re a black comic or rapper (and they’re surely next), but we have plenty of people who use the n-word privately, and those who don’t in racial situations in many cases are thinking it, and they’re living their lives segregated from others of different races by choice.  The Civil Rights Act of 1968 broke down the legal race boundaries, but it did nothing much for social race boundaries, although I do admit things are much better now than they were 45 years ago — your local country club has at least 1 non-white member and maybe 1 woman member — great progress, eh?  What a waste of land those places are.

We have to first get these people to realize that their religion shouldn’t apply to others who don’t believe in it, and if their religion says that homosexuality is bad, it’s not a good religion at all if it excludes people who have no choice being what they are, and that being that is not a birth defect.  We also have to show them that whatever sexual preference people have should have no bearing on them as a person anymore than being left-handed, red-headed, a person of some color other than peachy white, or disabled.

Gay sir-uh, sir-uhhhhhhhhhhh

Leave a reply

As of 2010, appx 2.3 million Americans are either active military (appx 1.45 million) or in the reserves (appx 850,000), and it’s been estimated by various reputable sources that the number of people in America who are members of the LGBT community are appx 4% (12 million people), so assuming that the military typically doesn’t attract the LGBT community, and assuming maybe only 1 in 100 of LGBT persons want to be soldiers (20,000), on the low side of this equation, there are appx 20,000 US soldiers who are either gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

Of course, that’s strictly conjecture on my part, as nobody has a clue what the true numbers are, but there’s at least 1, and she’s an Army General (Brig. Gen. Tammy S. Smith), and if you support the troops, you should support ALL of them as long as they are doing the rightful, legal thing as Americans & soldiers, so since being LGBT soldier is not a crime (anymore), if you support ALL the troops, you should be supporting soldiers who are LGBT.

Most people don’t think about these things — they prefer to think in terms of “black & white” and ignore what they can’t get their arms around intellectually, but since the world is filled with shades of gray, looking for black & white answers in our world is a faulty premise, logically speaking.

So expand your mind and imagine the possibilities.  If you believe there is a God, certainly since He (or She) gave us a mind to think with, surely He/She hoped we’d use it every now and then to see how ignorant we are.