True Equality and Empowerment

If wanting equal rights for women, minorities, and the gay community makes me a heathen, so be it. If you have gay friends, & you vote Republican, in my opinion, you don't truly support your friend, because the GOP doesn't view gay people as equal citizens. I value everyone equally. I really mean that. You have the right to marry, share health insurance; be with your sick partner in the hospital to hold their hand, just like I would do for my spouse. Women have the right to choose. Minorities are no less a person than anyone else. I honestly believe we ARE here to help and take care of each other when it's needed. Why is all this so hard to comprehend and why is it wrong?

I am going to the polls tomorrow with a heavy heart, because I know that there's a large number of people in this country, who for varying reasons of ignorance and intolerance don't agree with me. Be it because of lack of education, lack of exposure to people of various cultures and backgrounds, or religious intolerance, there are those who might never change their minds or open their hearts to other segments of society.

How many children have been shunned from their families because they are gay? How many have committed suicide? I personally experienced this my freshman year in college, when a classmate committed suicide because his strict religious family found out he was gay and told him he was mentally ill and needed to be cured. I will never forget him. 

I think about how many people of color: Black, Asian, American Indian, lived their whole lives in misery, never knowing freedom. Working, the field, the railroads, lumped into reservations.

How many women who never learned how to read or write, or got the chance to vote. 

How many homosexuals lived their whole lives as a lie, never being able to express their love freely, and if they did, well.... look what happened to poor Oscar Wilde.

When I see and hear hate rhetoric in the guise of politics and religion it sickens me to the core. I know it may sound extreme to some, but it is no less than when Hitler played into the fear and dislike of the ugly foreigner in the person of the Jew, whom he blamed for the extreme recession and poverty after WWI. Is the scapegoating of the "Godless Liberal", "The Illegal Alien", or "The Sinful Homosexual" any different? Of course this is not to say we have been herded into camps and ghettos, thank goodness. I am speaking on the level of rhetoric only.

Hate only begets more hate. The concept of getting to the top at all costs means that lambs must be sacrificed, and the lambs my friends, will be us. A system is created whereby only the elite few can succeed, thereby keeping the rest under submission. Hurling criticisms of socialism, while ironically, and covertly promoting fascism.

Don't let them silence you, or make you feel like you are any less of a person because you lack wealth, prestige, your skin is a different color, you are disabled, you worship differently, or worship no god at all. Ultimately, you have the power. Own it!