It happens every so often when my sister and I come down to our conservative hometown and get a little too relaxed with our thinking. We occasional would end up shouting at a relative who still doesn’t believe that the members of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community should have the right to marry because of their religious beliefs.
We attempt to sway their thinking from the teachings that they received all of their lives from clerical figures and open their minds to other religious options that include love, such as the Religious Left, but like the LGBT movement we would end up arguing about the thoughts from the older relatives minds still had a long ways to go.
There is a question on all blood donation screening questions that ask, “From 1977 to the present, have you had sexual contact with another male, even once?” Till this day the Food and Drug Administration policy bans sexually active gay men from ever donating blood even as HIV detection tests and procedures for screening donated blood have improved greatly since 1977 and blood shortages have become increasingly common.
There are still some instances where employees are being fired just because they were LGBT. Young kids are still being bullied to death just because of their sexual orientation today, and not every LGBT person can get married in many countries in the world including the majority of the states in the US. All across the globe I still hear stories of LGBT people getting murdered in the streets for being who they are and falling in love, but these older relatives at home, and even some young adults from the area, become defensive when you bring up the struggles and lack of rights the LGBT community have today.
They would yell back at us saying that they still treated the LGBT community with kindness and decency, but that when it came to their core beliefs that they would not be swayed, “you guys are the same person…you always want to change my beliefs,” they would say angrily. “Sometimes you have to let people think the way they want to think.” However, should we continue to never bring up a new way of thinking if the way that person’s original way of thinking was hurting a large amount of people in the process? It was something my sister and I continued to struggle with every time we went back home.
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This is a big issue for me not just when we go back home but when i talk to some of my really conservative friends or just people who may not be educated in all the injustices that still go on to citizens, not just in other countries, but in our own. They don’t realize or maybe they don’t care that these issues are happening in our very own back yard. We are suppose to be a free country that has all these opportunities but very few states even allow gays to marry and only 11 states allow same sex couples to adopt. I think this is ridiculous that in 2013 when we have come so far in other civil rights movements that people are still getting fired in the US for being gay. Sometimes it just seems like the easy way to give up trying to inform close minded people, but what will happen if we all just give up? We wouldn’t get anywhere, we all need to fight for what is right and educate people with different ideas and cultures in a non threatening way without trying to force your opinion on them. i know it is a long journey but this is our civil rights movement and we can not give up on it.
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Very well said, and I couldn’t agree with you more. This is the reason why I wrote this post. I only hope that the more we try and sit down with people to talk to them about what is going on around them, the more they will open their minds to new ideas and become more accepting of people who appear different to them.
Thank you for commenting.
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