It's a Rant
I've got a new peeve: when I post something about legal inequalities regarding queers and being upset that I'm not an equal under certain laws and I'm told to sit down and shut up, that I'm immature and I need to learn to be patient. (Actually, I'd be peeved if this happened in real life, but in real life I have the extraordinary superpower of Angry Tiny Person Glare with Added Queer Theory To Baffle With. If nothing else, it shuts people up.)
I won't sit down. I won't shut up. I don't want to wait a couple years until the federal government recognizes certain types of marriage. (I think it'd be an inappropriate 10th anniversary gift to same sex marriage in Massachusetts for the federal government to say, "Oh, by the way, we're finally recognizing that you could possibly actually be getting equal rights to your opposite sex coupled neighbours. Happy anniversary!") I think DADT is hurting straights as well as queers - we're weeding out the ranks of our military while we're at war. It doesn't take a genius to see that that's a bad idea.
Also, "The fight for African American Equality was not won in a damn day in this nation's history."
Well, I'm not African-American, nor did I specialise in the twentieth century in history, but my family and my nuns would have tanned my hide if I didn't know this: Neither African American rights nor women's rights came by people sitting down and shutting up and towing the party line.
My great-grandmother, widow and mother and breadwinner, marched with the first suffrage meeting in this country. She was pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables and heckled and told to go home to her husband. My cousins and mother worked with women's right and African American rights in the 60's and 70's because they were women and one of them married an African American man and wanted her children to grow up in an equal world.
None of them earned anything by shutting up and waiting until it was convenient. It is never convenient. We are never convenient. But rights - that is, things that should be inherent but are being denied by law - shouldn't wait convenience. That's why they're rights and not conveniences.
I won't sit down. I won't shut up. I don't want to wait a couple years until the federal government recognizes certain types of marriage. (I think it'd be an inappropriate 10th anniversary gift to same sex marriage in Massachusetts for the federal government to say, "Oh, by the way, we're finally recognizing that you could possibly actually be getting equal rights to your opposite sex coupled neighbours. Happy anniversary!") I think DADT is hurting straights as well as queers - we're weeding out the ranks of our military while we're at war. It doesn't take a genius to see that that's a bad idea.
Also, "The fight for African American Equality was not won in a damn day in this nation's history."
Well, I'm not African-American, nor did I specialise in the twentieth century in history, but my family and my nuns would have tanned my hide if I didn't know this: Neither African American rights nor women's rights came by people sitting down and shutting up and towing the party line.
My great-grandmother, widow and mother and breadwinner, marched with the first suffrage meeting in this country. She was pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables and heckled and told to go home to her husband. My cousins and mother worked with women's right and African American rights in the 60's and 70's because they were women and one of them married an African American man and wanted her children to grow up in an equal world.
None of them earned anything by shutting up and waiting until it was convenient. It is never convenient. We are never convenient. But rights - that is, things that should be inherent but are being denied by law - shouldn't wait convenience. That's why they're rights and not conveniences.