Being Thankful Day Four: LGBT Organizations

               It always helps to have someone on your side and organizations like GLAAD and the Human Right Campaign are the help that we need, and I am thankful that they are there. I am thankful that they take up the fight for the LGBT+ community, that they raise awareness, and sponsor wonderful events like Spirit Day.

               I am thankful for these organizations because they bring awareness to issues in the community that I may not be aware of. They also hold groups like the film and TV industry responsible for fair representation of the LGBT+ community in media. I am thankful for these organizations because they bring of the awareness they bring our struggles for workplace equality. I am thankful because these organization can be a voice for thousands in the LGBT+ community.

Being Thankful Day Two: Marriage Equality

               Friday June 26, 2015 will be a day that many in the LGBT+ community will always remember, it is the day that we got the right to marry. I will admit I was in shock. I really didn’t believe that I would see it in my lifetime and I am only 34. I expected that this would be the thing of future generations who were wiser and more learned than my own. So to see it happen was a total surprise to me. I look at Jim Obergefell who brought the case to the Supreme Court with admiration. His courage to take a stand and fight is awe inspiring.

              

I am thankful for this because as I have gotten older marriage is one of those things that I think I would consider. I spent my teens and 20s dismissing marriage as an archaic concept. Now I see it as something beautiful that exist as a symbol of love, not just a government contract. When the fight for marriage equality began it was before I came to terms with my sexuality and I remember looking at images of happy same-sex couples getting married and feeling a pang in my heart, and secretly wishing that was me one day.

I’m thankful for this because what it means beyond love. Yes love is important, and being in love is the reason you should get married, but there’s legal issues too, and marriage equality opened up a whole host of legal protections for same-sex couples. From things like being able to be by your dying partners side or being able to leave your pension to your partner in the event of your death. These are the things that we should have had a long time ago, but at least we have them now, and I’m grateful for that.

Rights and History

I just want to talk about rights and how we as the LGBT+ community deserves them. I look at the current state of LGBT+ rights and it makes me sick, for every stride that we make we have assholes like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and the rest of their cronies who would like to see the strides we have taken away. Justice Scalia still whines about losing the marriage equality fight. It seems that everywhere we turn that someone wants to take our hard earned rights away. Why, because we love differently, or because we choose to be who we truly are? I look at the battle we fight as members of the LGBT+ community and I can’t help but see parallels to the civil rights movement of the 60s. With the black community of the 1960s it was court orders to integrate college campuses, for us it’s marriage equality, and even though we have a court order from the highest court in the land we are still fighting battles for something as simple as a marriage license. Frankly I’m tired of going to Huff Post and seeing Kim Davis’s face, I think her 15 minutes of bigoted fame has come and gone.

Then we can take a look at discrimination with the little things like equal protection under the law, equal opportunity employment, and housing rights. I mean we’re not asking for much just the same things that every heteronormative and cisnormative individual has. This shouldn’t be that hard, there’s no asterisk next to all men are created equal, there is no “but” in the civil right act. The fact that some people likes boys instead girls, girls instead of boys, or identifies as a gender different from the one assigned to them at birth should not make them any less of a human being. So why is it that in most cities I can still is be fired from my job or denied medical care? There is nothing about my sexuality that makes my skillset any different or my body any less functional.

Then let’s talk about the elephant in the room, cakes. Now I know I have said some things before about Christians and their businesses and what I think they can do with them, and there’s part of me that firmly believes what I say, however I don’t think we should be fighting this war over cake, flowers, or catering in general. I believe the concept of discriminating against someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity is ridiculous. This discrimination in 2015 looks as ridiculous as discriminating against someone based on their race looked in the 1960s. How can we claim to be a progressive society; a melting pot of different cultures, ideas and beliefs yet we want to exclude one segment of the population just because they are different.

So as we come to the end of LGBT history month let’s also remember that this fight didn’t start with marriage equality. Anyone coming here from my Instagram (@ravenillusion) knows that I’ve been covering LGBT history month events there just to show some of the struggles and triumphs that have happened in the past. There are many pioneers that have come and gone that have fought for the rights that we have today so take some time to remember them, and look onward to the pioneers of the future.