The Recent Anti-discrimination decision by the Supreme Court helped, but needs to go further to undo the bigotry in this administration
The United States is supposed to be, by our own verbiage, a “city on a hill” and a refuge for all those wanting to be free and able to work for their own betterment. That should obviously include the LGBTQ communities, or it doesn’t REALLY mean everybody. However, there are bigots in this country who want to claim that Gay, Lesbian, and Transgendered people are asking for something special when we ask for our rights to be our better, happier selves, that others get without question.
Whether they do that based on their particular religious beliefs or some reactionary harkening back to the dark ages where human sexuality and identity were not fully understood in the huge diversity like it is now, the bottom line is that a country like the United States is being dishonest, and contradicting their own creed when they deny anybody their right to choose to live as they feel they need to, and perhaps even have to.
One of the stories they tell themselves to justify their bigotry is that the Constitution doesn’t allow for a just look at the inequality and rectification by applying rights across the board. Therefore they take exception to the Supreme Court ruling that decided that the governmental category of “marriage” applied equally to same-gender partners as it did different gendered partners. Anything else is denying the LG part of that broaden the umbrella their equality before the law where relationships are involved.
Under Obama, and with his leadership, the Gay and Lesbian community finally got at least the category of marriage equally dispersed. I said at the time that was the ONLY fair way to enforce government policies around domestic partnerships. Any other category, even calling one domestic partnership and the other marriage, would create another “separate and not equal” set up just as the so-called “separate but equal” school system did. The result of that was that Black Children in public schools got extremely poorer quality education. The same thing would happen if the so-called “separate equal” lie had been applied to the Gay and Lesbian Experience. That too would have ended being a mere token of what is provided to heterosexual relationships.
But even with Obama being the first president to ever give support to the minority Gay and Lesbian populations, and us ending up with marriage equality, many states still reserved “the right” to deny a Gay or Lesbian person the right to earn a living. Just recently, this year, in fact, the Supreme Court ruled that would no longer be the case. Gays and Lesbians and transgenders hopefully now have the same rights to keep their wages as anybody else. And NO I do not thank trump for that because he stood against it, and even afterward complained.
The fact is that trump cares nothing for ANY minority. He started in 2015 demonizing all Hispanics and all Muslims, even lying to smear them for allegedly cheering when the Twin Towers fell. Nobody and that means absolutely no other reputable or even semi-reputable source has ever put a statement confirming that slander, because the even simply did not happen.
But, for Islamophobes, it was enough to rile them up, and therefore his actions got him the reward he wanted. Like all demagogues, I suggested at the time that since he has used Hispanics and Islamic as a class to gin up hatred and fear, he would expand that other groups as time went on.
And guess what, that is precisely what he did. First, it was media, where any statement that wasn’t in lockstep with his opinion was “fake news”. Then he went after transgendered folks that had to serve honorably in the military and decided, on his own, that the United States Military would not allow any transgendered person to serve. Now he has gone even further and has gone after Black Lives Matter, a movement protesting excessive police violence against Black people. Strangely enough, the KKK or the White Nationalists or the Nazis or militant so-called militia like the Oath Keepers and the Boogooloo boys seem to pass under his radar. Wonder why THAT is?
Sadly, the recent anti-discrimination decision by the Supreme Court, while a wise and surprisingly humane decision as far as it went, didn’t include the military in its scope. So the military still has to be fought in court separately.
