I had a great post lined up for this thread yesterday, but it was lost in a "closed the wrong tab" incident, and all was lost. So, I've taken some time, and I'm going to try and reshare my thoughts from the other day.
Bigotry, in general, is a stupid concept. It is very much an indulgence in this perverse idea that because people are different from one another, one group must surely be better than another. People set up walls, and really, having some kind of small subculture as a scapegoat is a pretty efficient way to keep the good old "Groupthink" going.
It's a form of control, and that form says "Think and act like me, or you're worthless."
People have died because of this way of thinking. If you look at the homicide rate against gay and transgender people, it's through the roof. Same with the suicide rates of both demographics. Some groups of people love to bully those that are misunderstood and mislabeled. It's treated like a disease.
I dealt with this kind of treatment quite a lot during my senior year, when I came out to everyone that I was dating a transgendered Male-to-Female woman. There was a lot of relentless teasing, and I'd occasionally hear people call me a "faggot".
Even the employers that fired me at my fast-food job when I was 18 referred to me as a faggot after I had left. You try to think the best of the world, and that it's so opportunistic and open-minded, just ready for social progress, and then you experience things like that.
My own dad tried to take me to therapy, because he thought I was mentally ill. It's not fun having your own preferences described as a mental illness; if anything it's incredibly degrading.
My point: who cares what way a person swings, what gender a person was biologically born as, or what swings between a person's legs? We should take it upon ourselves to at least treat each other with a shred of decency. All these people want to do is find somebody that loves them for who they are, get married possibly, and maybe start a family someday. It's nice to see their portrayal is slowly getting better in the media as a whole, but having to deal with the onslaught of homophobes trying to run for president in the US (under the veil of "The War on Religion", no less) really puts a damper on how I feel about my country sometimes.
Hey, at least gays can die for their country now, by serving in the Armed Forces. But, until some of these social problems and constructs are fixed, I really am not sure that the US is entirely worth dying for.
