Your Right as a Second-Class Citizen

I recently saw a statistic that had me floored and shot my blood pressure through the roof:  more than thirty percent of LGBT voters voted republican.  I understand the anger with democrats, I understand the anger with President Obama, I understand the anger and frustration with Harry Reid, I, however, do not understand taking focusing that anger into an energy that helped to elect candidates who make it part of their platform to attack, demonize, and force a view of inferiority onto LGBT persons.  I recently listened to the responses of some of the LGBT persons who supported the GOP on the Michelangelo Signorile Show and again was shocked at some of the self-centered answers from these idiots.

All of the excuses, yes excuses, not reasons, for voting against their rights revolved around how the government was spending the taxpayers’ money.   Money!  Greediness, as it has been since the Reagan administration, has helped the republicans retain office election cycle after election cycle and this cycle was no different.  This, however, is appalling because that thirty percent of LGBT Americans voted not only against their rights, but also against the rights of every other LGBT person in the nation.  Now, we can say farewell to a repeal of DOMA, good-bye to the implementation of ENDA, and now DADT repeal is in jeopardy.  The rights of a minority, not just any minority, our minority, which were within legislative grasp now, as Congressman Barney Frank put it so eloquently, has a “zero chance” of coming to fruition now that we have lost the most LGBT-issue progressive White House and Congress in history.  This greedy LGBT republican-voting electorate helped to remove the gavel from the hand of the most effective progressive House Speaker and champion of voting of LGBT rights in modern history.  These self-absorbed idiots took their childish hissy fits to the polls and killed any chance of us gaining any of these rights within the near future.

Many of the GOP-voting LGBT callers kept telling Signorile that they were not interested in getting married, or taking advantage of many of the rights for which so many of us are fighting.  I like to look a little deeper into what getting rights mean for our community.  It is not about whether or not we as individuals take advantage of and utilize all of the rights that we should already enjoy across the board, but what gaining these rights will mean for our community and its members.  So long as we are not treated like everyone else with respect to the law, we are effectively seen as second-class citizens not only in the eyes of the law, but also in the eyes of anti-LGBT bigots or just other non-LGBT persons.  Blacks were viewed as second-class citizens long after slavery was abolished because of Jim Crow laws and the Caste System.  LGBT Americans voting republican is comparable to blacks voting known Ku Klux Klan members to run legislative offices during the Jim Crow era, or Jews voting for the Nazi party during the holocaust.

So long as we are second-class citizens within this nation, discrimination is harder to fight, bullying is harder to tame, teen suicides will be harder to curtail; we as a community will fail if we fall into of a habit of voting against ourselves with passion, instead of using that same passion to fight for our rights.  My mom asked me why are LGBT-rights so much more important to me than issues like jobs and the economy, especially because I haven’t been able to find a job in my field, even though I’ve graduated over a year ago.  My answer to her question:  “Mom, I understand your concern, but until the day I become equal to you, dad, and every other hetero-American, my becoming a first-class citizen within this ‘free’ nation is, for me, the utmost important issue every time I cast a ballot.”  After asking me this during every election since I was first able to vote in 2004, this finally answered her nagging inquiry, just as I hope it answers your questions about my methods--why I wrote this essay.  As you read this, please know this is America, and you as an American citizen, have the right to voice your opinion and anger with passion, or passive-aggressiveness, at the ballot box.  Nevertheless, you must also remember, that although this is a right that is at the same par with heterosexual Americans, you are not entirely free in this “free” nation, this is just one of your many rights as a second-class citizen, but do remember the rights you do not have when you exercise this right.