Sunday, March 15, 2015

Honorable Mention

I don’t know if you noticed that LGBT people got mentioned by the President in his Selma speech last week. In the speech he said,
Because of what they did, the doors of opportunity swung open not just for African-Americans, but for every American. Women marched through those doors. Latinos marched through those doors. Asian-Americans, gay Americans, and Americans with disabilities came through those doors. Their endeavors gave the entire South the chance to rise again, not by reasserting the past, but by transcending the past.
[…]
We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent to America. If you think nothing's changed in the past fifty years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or L.A. of the Fifties. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing's changed. Ask your gay friend if it's easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress — our progress — would be to rob us of our own agency; our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.
[…]
We are the gay Americans whose blood ran on the streets of San Francisco and New York, just as blood ran down this bridge.
It doesn’t seem like much, but it is an acknowledgement of our civil rights struggle. It is an acknowledgement of the lives that have been shed. But most importantly it is an acknowledgement of us.

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