May we one day live in a world where everyone has that privilege

From a Friend on Facebook: on this national coming out day: thank you to everyone in my life who has made it possible for me to be honest about who i am and who i love. may we one day live in a world where everyone has that privilege.

Civil rights are some of those things that are often and easily rationalized away. As a straight married man, I have a unique prospective when it comes to LGBT rights in this country.

It would be very easy to do nothing and give nothing to bring about equality for the LGBT community. I could very easily say that I support the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (which is so hot right now) and not call the White House to complain. I could easily believe that everyone should have the right to get married and then not act upon the calls to action when bigoted legislation like Prop 8 are proposed. But I don’t. Most of the time.

Yeah sometimes I delete the Victory Fund emails and the Human Rights Campaign legislative alerts. I was a member of HRC’s PAC but ended my subscription (granted I was broke at the time). But for the same reason that my prospective is unique, I easily become complacent about the inequity of our country’s current legal view of gay folks.

Those pesky civil rights getting all easy to take for granted.

The LGBT rights movement in this country should have the same mojo as the civil right movement had in the 1960s. In that I wasn’t around during that time, I only know what I know from history books: all the white people in the North (each and every one of them) were so in favor of ending Jim Crow in the South that they were willing to send almost no one to the March on Washington to prove it or work in the South to stand for equality...

But seriously now, when we look back on this period of time will we be proud of our actions or will we create an apocryphal history to hide the fact that California, while voting in mass numbers for one of the most liberal presidents in a while, acted to codify discrimination in its state constitution? Will we be pleased with how we stood up to the teabagging-small-government-except-in-your-bedroom numbskulls or will we paint a picture of how these bigoted, ignorant, followers of Glen Beck were just one of many points of view that helped make our country stronger?

So on this National Coming Out Day I am coming out for civil rights…no more talking or painting pictures.