We live in a nation that is quick and proud to boast that it is a beacon of freedom, equality and social justice. Yet we know it has not always been the case that our pride is justified by our practice.
In fact, we recognize as Americans in 2010 that it is the case that our nation has defiled itself by paying lip-service to equality and justice while at the same time proliferating bigotry and injustice with public policies that put people into bondage and separate schools, restrict voting rights based on physical differences, and restrict eligibility to work, food and housing.
Many people of our time now feel that the climate in this country champions equality on the surface, while clinging to a dark, shameful underside of racism, sexism or intolerance in reality.
I feel it is self-evident, even without taking the recent string of suicides into consideration, that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people and those people who support their equality still face a shameful, brash, and inexcusable opposition to the notion that no one in this country deserves to be treated differently from somebody else because he or she is different.
For some, this lingering discrepancy may be easy to overlook, even easy to excuse, if one personally is not affected by this disparity of rights.
Yet the fact remains that where even one is subjugated under the shroud of representative democracy, all of those who are shrouded share equally in that subjugation. This is because whatever power the government has to deny any right to a man because he is gay, or a couple because they are lesbian, is the same power to deny any right to a woman because she is Latina, or a couple because they are Jewish or interracial.
The intolerance which breeds an environment in which a young man is harassed and berated at school because he is gay is exactly the same intolerance which sent innocent people to be suffocated in gas chambers and hanged from trees.
When you do not raise your voice to protest intolerance, you only magnify the voices of those who shout to sustain it. When you do not condemn an act of subjugation, you invite someone else to step in and begin to subjugate yourself. When you do not fight to uphold the rights of another, you invite someone to come and steal your rights as well. If all of us in this country who want liberty for ourselves were equally as committed to fighting for the liberty of others, then no one ever would be able to again withhold those rights from any of us.
My rights are exactly the same as yours. Your humanity is exactly the same as mine. Where rights are deprived from one of us, they are deprived from us all. Where one dies in anguish because no one would speak up to stop the madness, we all are guilty if we too are silent.
I wish to stress in conclusion that the present struggle is not a fight for gay rights or gender rights, but a fight for rights. A quote by Dr. King, I feel, adequately describes the mentality needed to become one as a nation and as a people — “Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Love cannot drive out love: only hate can do that.”
To be worthy of the rights we do have, we must secure them for others as well. We all are in bondage if one is chained by the law that makes the rest of us free.
We all are shut out if one is outcast by law that makes the rest of us included. We can, each one of us, be equal if and only if each and every one of us is equal. Therefore, a fight for the equality of myself is a fight for your equality. A fight for the rights of one is a fight for the rights of all.
Jordan Collier is a freshman at the University.
