Why The Fight For LGBT Equality Will Never Be Over

[W!nston]

What The Religious Right Envisions As An Endgame After Losing The Fight Against LGBT Equality
ThinkProgress | By Zack Ford | Arpil 10, 2015 8:00 AM EDT

In his new book, It’s Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, and Winning True Equality, radio host Michelangelo Signorile warns that the LGBT movement is suffering from “victory blindness,” the notion that the struggle for equality has already been won and there aren’t still battles to fight. “There’s a disconnect between the way we talk about the strides forward and the reality on the ground,” he writes. “This narrowing of scope to talk only about successes — that’s victory blindness.” Complacency, he worries, could lead to setback, urging, “We’ve got to pay attention now perhaps more than ever before as equality’s opponents gather their forces.”

With the national corporate backlash against pro-discrimination bills in states like Indiana and Arkansas and an impending marriage equality decision expected from the Supreme Court, opponents of LGBT equality — largely conservative faith leaders — may feel backed into a corner, but many are as battle-ready as ever. Focus on the Family founder James Dobson believes a civil war could be fought over same-sex marriage. Rick Scarborough of Vision America Action believes, “This is a Bonhoeffer moment,” referring to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who resisted the Nazi dictatorship. But without resorting to such exaggerations of violent rhetoric, one prominent faith leader has offered a more candid observation about where things stand.

Denny Burk, professor of biblical studies at Boyce College (the undergraduate arm of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary), is no stranger to anti-LGBT advocacy. Most notably, he co-authored the Southern Baptist Convention’s resolution rejecting the existence of transgender identities. “At the heart of the transgender revolution,” he said at a conference in October, “is the notion that psychological identity trumps bodily identity.” After comparing trans people to individuals who desire to have limbs amputated, Burk asked, “Does the body need adjusting, or does the thinking?”

This week, he reflected on the Indiana “religious freedom” controversy, noting, “It was a moment that revealed how profoundly this country has changed in its attitudes about homosexuality, how out-of-step evangelicals are with the new sexual orthodoxy, and how willing many Americans are to punish evangelicals for their transgressive beliefs.”

Burk believes that “religious liberty took an epic beating last week” and that evangelicals have become “a bona fide minority when it comes to our commitment to Jesus’ teaching about sexuality” — a minority despised for their ideas. But he still sees the conflict as a fairly simple one. “Evangelicals believe that homosexuality is a sin while the rest of the culture does not,” he observed. “The heart of this conflict is a moral conflagration between those who insist that ‘gay is good‘ and those who contend that it is not.” Christians, as he defines them, must be prepared to endure the “injustice” of fines and jail time if that’s what it takes to maintain anti-LGBT beliefs, including the discriminatory actions motivated by them.

Burk admits that many conservatives will abandon their prejudiced beliefs, but “a remnant will remain who will not bow the knee to Baal and who will not betray Christ’s word no matter the cost.” Unlike the hyperbole employed by Dobson and Scarborough, his threat to the LGBT equality movement is much more realistic: “You are going to have to go all the way. And when you’ve done your worst, the Christians are still going to be here holding fast to the faith once for all delivered to the saints. America is a flash in the historical pan. Christianity is not. We will outlast you. Mark it down.”

This is exactly the kind of attitude that Signorile says the LGBT movement cannot abide, writing, “We can’t let our wins convince us we’re offending people or pushing too hard — or not being ‘magnanimous’ — when we demand full equality now and refused to accept mere tolerance.” Speaking to ThinkProgress specifically about Burk’s remarks, he added that “we need to always challenge them, always confront them and expose them and their beliefs.”

Signorile worries that a new generation of LGBT young people won’t have their guard up and won’t be prepared for the fight the right keeps bringing. “We see some of this with women — young women often not having much of the history, or taking for granted the right to an abortion,” he explained. But as long as there are people rejecting LGBT identities, the problem will persist. “I think we have to always stand up to religious bigotry because [religious conservatives] will have children and raise them with it,” Signorile warned. “Some of those kids will be LGBT too. We can’t just let it go.”

Burk may be right; there may be a contingent that remains stalwart in their opposition to a culture that fully embraces LGBT people as equals, just as there are still many opposed to other forms of social justice equality. As Signorile writes in the epilogue of It’s Not Over, this bluff must be called. “It’s time that all of us who support LGBT equality no longer agree to disagree on full civil rights for LGBT people,” he concludes. “Anything less than full acceptance and full civil rights must be defined as an expression of bias, whether implicit or explicit. And it has to be called out — even if that means challenging our friends, coworkers, and other we know and respect — if we’re to get beyond tolerance.”

SOURCE

 

[Frenchgerman]

While reading 'Le Monde' I found an article about the Hilary Clinton announcement clip being 'censured' in Russia (I put the braces around censured because the clip is not really censored, but states it's inapte for minors) ...
http://anon.projectarchive.net/?htt...inton-interdit-aux-moins-de-18-ans-en-russie/

Furthermore, I found an article (of which some commentors to the Le Monde article spoke) by the Washington Post dated Feb 3 2014 talking about the American States that have similar laws on homosexuality in the books ...
http://anon.projectarchive.net/?htt...ies-similar-to-russias-ban-on-gay-propaganda/

what will be the situation if equality is gained ?
Will the texans be forbidden to talk about their mariage to another man ? will there still be an interdiction to talk about stable LGBT families in Utah ? loving same sexe relationships in AZ ...

 

[trencherman]

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. Whoever said it first and there are many claims to this, rings with unassailable truth more than ever if one just looks around. Progressives commit an unpardonable error to assume that the fight is over once the prize is won. Now they are finding that the civil rights victories of the fifties and sixties have to be fought all over again. Same with the measures to dismantle the unfair advantages of the one percenter plutocrats launched by FDR. Same with LBJ’s War against Poverty. Same with Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

 

[topdog]

Well... two things come to mind.

First, to paraphrase Wendy in Peter Pan: "Never... is an awfully long time." So, it will never be over? Really? 100 years? 1000 years? Ever? I think in 50 years the thought of a gay couple being different from a straight couple will be as unfathomable as slavery.

Its just demographics and math. You see all those old straight people that are kicking up a fuss? They are all going to be dead. Their great grandchildren will wince when they come across these bigoted quotes. They will try to look past the embarrassingly ignorant statements because, well, things were different back in the early 21st century. Every day 300,000 children are born that will grow up in a world where being gay is no big deal, and 100,000 stuck in the old ways of thinking die off.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying we can slack off and everyone will live happily ever after. That brings me to the second thought.

Fighting for "LGBT" rights is missing the bigger picture. We need to see that we are just a part of a much larger struggle to break down this whole way of thinking that the world is divided into "us" and "them". (Whoever "them" happens to be.) It's black vs. white; east vs. west; Catholics vs. Protestants; Shia Muslims vs. Suni Muslims; conservatives vs. liberals... just fill in the blanks.

We humans have this tribal thing. It's so easy to feel better about ourselves by writing off a whole group of people because they are just stupid or backwards or prejudiced (oh, the irony!) or pagan or religious or smelly or evil or dangerous. At least we are better than them. In the stone age this probably helped us survive, but in an interconnected world it's useless at best, murderous at worst. (See Holocaust, Rwanda, Nigerian school girls, Armenians... sadly the list is horrendously long.)

So, that's my thought on this article. It's thinking too small. It's not LGBT rights that are the goal. When the focus is that narrow, it's human nature to see ourselves as the righteous persecuted victims who gift the world with out enlightened perspective - completely missing the fact that we have just fallen into the same trap of looking down on "those people" who don't see the world as we do.

By all means, keep fighting because on that point I think Michael is right - this is a never-ending struggle. But it's not just our struggle and it's not just the right-wing bigots feeling desperate as they are pushed out of the main stream.

To quote the old Pogo cartoon: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

 

[W!nston]

So the fight for Gay Equality will be over in 50 years in places like Russia, China, many African nations and Islamic controlled parts of the world.

Gosh. I need a pair of rose-tinted glasses or some of whatever one smokes to have such a rosy vision of the future in 50 years.

:rofl:

 

[trencherman]

“There is no final victory. There is no final defeat. There is just the same battle. To be fought over and over again. So toughen up. Bloody toughen up!” | Tony Benn (1925-2014)