by Maria K.

Created on: March 05, 2009

To those who stated that gay rights issues are different from race-related civil rights issues, I would like to point out the formulation of the question: are the ISSUES different or parallel? Not the process, not the course their struggle took, not the ways in which these issues came up, but the issues themselves. And to that I have to answer - absolutely, they are parallel. Not only that, but the gay rights issues and the race-related issues are both parts of a larger group of "being different" issues: women's rights, religious rights, foreign nationals' rights - the list is fairly long.

Yes, people of different races and/or countries of origin used to live in clusters - naturally settling next to those, with whom they felt affinity, thus making it possible for the ignorant and the prejudiced to target entire communities at once.

Yes, a person of color - any color - is more likely to be discriminated against in a hostile environment, because his or her difference from that enviroment is quite literally written on the face. The majority of people of different races could not hide by being silent, because they could be identified as different by their appearance.

But what if they could not be? Let us recall the mulattos and the quadroons - African Americans in second, third and fourth generations, whose appearance betrayed nothing and yet, when discovered, the retaliation against them was that much more violent, as if they attempted to deceive the entire world by "pretending" to be white.

Is that not frighteningly similar to stories of gays, who either finally came out of the closet on their own or were discovered by someone else and were then ridiculed, persecuted and - quite often - beaten and murdered by those in their communities. Why? Because they "pretended" to be "normal". And the longer their period of silence was, the more violent the retaliation was. The message sent to the gay community essentially was: if you keep quiet, nobody cares, but if you are discovered, you follow in Matthew Shepard's footsteps. How is this reaction different from the lynchings? Or from the imprisonment and torture of women who demanded equal voting and property ownership rights? Or from the witch hunts for that matter?

The fact that all of these issues even became issues supports the argument that they are all related, in that all of them are associated with people, who are somehow different from a standard someone else had created and labeled acceptable. As an immigrant, a woman, a bi-sexual and a pagan, while never having experienced physical violence due to my deviations from the beaten path, I have tasted enough of other forms of discrimination to know that any - any - type of difference have, do and will continue to inspire pushback (in a variety of forms) from those who refuse to approach these differences in a logical and accepting manner, until that time when people have evolved enough to stop fearing that, which they do not fully know or understand.

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