Written: 12/31/2011
A few years ago I was meeting with a friend for a project and I remember the subject of marriage equality came up.
He had the culturally safe opinion that it should be legal, but with a different name than marriage. After pointing out the differences between marriage (civil) and matrimony (religious), I asserted that LGBT rights are the defining civil rights battle of our generation, and that we will be judged based on those rights.
He seemed to agree, we had work to do and it was a nice break before we dove back into the tedious paperwork. So this article at AMERICAblog interested me, here’s a great quote:
Ask Matthew Shepard how trivial the comparison is. Ask Alan Turing, who pretty much was forced to kill himself after being chemically castrated for being gay. Or ask all those gays who were forcibly lobotomized and actually castrated during the last century how trivial their suffering was.
Like the article so wonderfully puts it, no minority has the copyright on mistreatment, suffering and pain:
The entire discussion is offensive. It’s part of a twisted “my pain is greater than your pain” debate that some feel the need to have over and over again. It’s also reflective of the paranoid fear some in the gay civil rights movement have of “offending” anyone. In the end, I’m not even sure what the “debate” is about.
Give the whole things a read here.
All my best,
The King of Spades
