Now Is Not The Time to Let Anything Else Distract Us

The political and religious right-wing tries its best to sidetrack us so that we’re living in terms of their agenda, not ours. And they’ve got national think tanks to tell them how to take charge of the discussions. They count on distracting us, and it often works.

Yet, there’s really only one issue to discuss. Put simply in a sound bite manner that we need to repeat again and again to our culture and its media: it’s the right to express our diversity and our love for whomever anyone wants to love. Period.

Why is that so hard for people to get?

Maybe the better question is: Why is it so hard for us to stay on task and keep something as important as self-definitions and love in the forefront? Why is it so easy to get caught up in other discussions that sap our energy instead of just saying that this is about the freedom to be who we are and to love whom we want?

It’s not about whether it’s a choice. In fact, why do we care whether we can or can’t help being LGBTQ+ or not? The issue is irrelevant to our identities and love. Come to think of it, both are best when they are free choices.

It’s not about idealizing and achieving straight-acting relationships and their rigid gender roles. Straight-acting relationships are failing all around us and disappointing heterosexual couples right and left.

It’s not about whether religion and tradition affirm or reject anything at all. Down through history, we find religions and traditional ideas affirming or rejecting everything that’s ever happened or been believed. And we know that often religions that have preached human value and love have also — sometimes actually while claiming to be all-accepting and loving — supported deaths and war.

It’s not about waiting to respond to the next right-wing initiative. It’s about having a real LGBTQ+ agenda that’s a long list of everything we want, and about relentlessly pushing the agenda.

It’s not about changing the prejudices of the extreme right-wing. It’s about being out and about in the potentially supportive middle.

It’s not about whether or not other people like us or think we’re too pushy. It’s about securing our equal rights and full equality.

It’s not about being understood. We are complete human beings who deserve to be treated as fully human human beings whether people understand us or not. 

It’s not about the need to give those who don’t “understand” us more time. How many generations more are we willing to give up? How many more millennia are we willing to lose to people with prejudices?

It’s not about making sure that anti-LGBTQ+ positions are represented, as if we owe them some sort of equal opportunity. They already have the leadership of a political party, a grass roots network of thousands of churches, newspapers, magazines, radio programs, TV stations, and cable networks to get their ideas across. We’ve got to get over our liberal guilt about this as if we owe our abusers more “equal time.”

It’s not about smiling understandably while we listen to “friendly” politicians apologize to us because they can’t support our issues anytime their own reelection is on the line.

It’s not about being able to be quietly invisible as we work in our workplaces, learn in our educational institutions, or walk down our streets. It’s about never having to hide ourselves and our love by putting photos of them in our desk drawers, changing or avoiding pronouns in conversations, or remaining at a safe distance from the ones we love when we’re out together.

It’s not about whether or not some historical, political, or entertainment figure is LGBTQ. It’s about our own value, and our own lives here and now.

It’s not about whether our LGBTQ+ communities have dysfunctional or downright crazy people in them. Of course, we’ve got messed up individuals just like every group. We have no need to apologize for them either.

It’s not about our being attracted to whomever we’re attracted to. It’s about our parents’, children’s, politicians’, religious leaders’, and institutions’ homophobia, transphobia. anti-LGBTQ prejudices, and their poorly defined self-concepts.

It’s not really about sex. It’s about love. One of the many ways to express love is through sex, but people are not bashed only while they are having sex. They are “gay-bashed” for showing any signs of love to the same gender.

It’s not about whether or not we really like sex or we act sexually. It’s not about whether we have lots of sex or none. It’s not about the kinds of things we do in bed. The envy, fascination, obsession, falsifications, condemnation, and emotions expressed around LGBTQ+ sex in our society reflect our culture’s own sickness about any sex and pleasure. Our critics may not get this, but it’s to our peril if defending ourselves centers around an issue so thoroughly confused by our culture.

It’s not about whether or not the oppression of LGBTQ+ people is better or worse than racism or other oppressions. It just doesn’t matter whose oppression is worse. How tacky is that argument anyway? All oppression is connected, and it’s all reprehensible.

And, it’s not about whether people think that talking about gender self-expression and love is some pie-in-the-sky, far-fetched, wouldn’t-it-be-nice, woo-woo, idea that our dominant war-based society considers unrealistic. If people think so, that’s an expression of their own cynicism, fatalism, hopelessness, feelings of emptiness, past disappointments, lack of self-love, failures to experience love, and their inadequate upbringings.

What LGBTQ people are asking for is nothing more — and certainly nothing less — than changing a fear-based, exclusionary society into an inclusive, love-based one. Few believe this can be done; fear is so integral to our way of doing things that adults can hardly conceive of a world without it. 

What we are asking for is something everyone needs, and deeply wants. Even if we don’t get there soon, though, the core issue of our goal that’s simple enough to be expressed over and over in sound bites, and radical enough to cause trouble, is the right for everyone to love whoever they are and whomever they choose.