In the 1940s Blacks had to fight for basic rights to services in this country, including economic equality. It's too bad gays are trying to derail the civil rights movement.The civil rights movement made some important changes in the US for Blacks and women. At stake was equal protection under the law, as granted by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution as well as economic equality – equal pay for equal work and the opportunity to rise as far as talent will allow.
Without giving too much of a history lesson here, the civil rights movement was helped along by several factors. One factor was Congress passing the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the US Constitution. These outlawed slavery, allowed for naturalized citizenship, established due process and equal protection, and extended voting rights to Blacks. Voting rights for women were established on a federal level with the 19th Amendment.
Even with a Constitutional amendment, equal protection and economic equality were kept from Blacks because of racial bigotry and Jim Crow laws. For example, it wasn't until the NAACP pushed through the legal precedent of Brown v. The Board of Education that progress was made to extend equal protection to Blacks. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 followed the court rulings. It “prohibited discrimination in public facilities, in government, and in employment, invalidating the Jim Crow laws in the southern U.S. It became illegal to compel segregation of the races in schools, housing, or hiring. Powers given to enforce the bill were initially weak, but were supplemented during later years.” (Wikipedia)
Over the years of the civil rights movement, Blacks and women have attained status as a protected class creating, in some cases, government intervention to protect the rights of both groups by creating college admissions requirements and government institution hiring practices.
But enough history. The question now is “How have gays hijacked the civil rights movement?”
Protected Class Status
“Gays” as a social construct began in the early 1970s. Homosexuals took up the term gay as a class designation, understanding two things: 1) Homosexuality is considered by most people to be an aberrant sexual practice. 2) People would not generally accept homosexual sex as normative, but might come to accept homosexuality under the name “gay” as a “lifestyle” choice. Homosexuals also took up the tools of the civil rights movement to push the newly formed gay class into public acceptance. They used identity politics to create group identity and establish themselves as an “oppressed” group. (Never mind for the moment that homosexuals in the US have not suffered the oppressions of slavery, lack of voting rights or economic disability, but only retain the social stigma of homosexual sex.) With identity politics in hand, they began to use the courts to try and establish their class status.
Gays, as a new class, gradually pushed for greater and greater class status, depending on the rubrics of civil rights to invent gay ideals within the US. These ideals could never be established if people were reminded that the category of gay merely represented a group of people who identify themselves based on homosexual sexual preference. For the class status to stand, gays had to hide that fact in order to make inroads with the courts and then with the general population.
The AIDS epidemic gave gays a boost to class identity. The HIV virus was truly fearsome and devastating before medicine caught up with it to identify it. But the real tragedy was how gays abused the disease to further their class status. Here was something that gays could rally around which fit into their oppressed identity and could make them a pitiable group in public opinion. Wrapping themselves up in their “oppression” (as if an STD is oppressive) gays pushed for more court recognition and government funding, claiming AIDS as their own while at the same time denying that it was associated with homosexual sex. Gays abused the fear of AIDS, a lethal disease, to bring a general fear to the public and push for further political gains. (It's interesting to note that as soon as AIDS became treatable and government earmarked considerable money toward its cure, that the furor over AIDS has died out.)
Laws outlawing homosexual sex also had to go - likened by gays to Jim Crow laws (an insulting analogy at best). Never mind that anti-sodomy laws applied equally to all citizens of the US. Forget that these laws had long precedent with the moral values of the founders of our country. In 2003, the US Supreme Court overturned anti-sodomy laws in the case Lawrence v. Texas.
With each political gain, the idea of a gays as a class has gained more and more public acceptance. We are now a generation removed from its inception and young people who have no historical reference have come to accept gays as a class on general terms of civil rights.
With an influx of the new generation, a growing ideal of individualism, and a complete misapplication of civil rights and liberties, gays have pressed for a protected status on par with Blacks and women. Because, to many people's minds, gays have already achieved such status, gays now press for other political gains: separate schools (another sad commentary on civil rights), inculcation of gay ideals in education, removal of opposing views (i.e., the attack on religion and the religious), and finally, the acceptance within social institutions such as marriage.
The Problem with “Gay” Marriage
The push to allow same sex marriage is where gays as a class have done real damage to the civil rights movement. By insisting that “gay” is a protected class and pressing the matter on this one issue, gays have pushed the American people to a limit of credulity and acceptance. The American people, left with little choice, have in turn passed constitutional amendments in many states to protect the institution of marriage. California's Proposition 8 has become a major battleground between the two ideologies.
Gays understand that if they can break the institution of marriage and its meaning, then there are no other boundaries to prevent gays from total acceptance as a protected class. However, and this is key, there really is no such thing as a gay class. It is a complete social construct based on sexual preference. By trying to destroy the institution of marriage by allowing same sex marriages, gays would have sufficient judicial leverage to insist on complete social acceptance.
Blacks cannot choose to be another race. Women cannot choose to be men. Both classes are readily identifiable by physical characteristics. Because of these characteristics, Blacks or women have no burden of proof with relation to their classes. With gays, this is different. If “gay” becomes a protected class, then there is no burden of proof for protected status. There is no physical demonstration of “gayness” nor are there any other standards that determine if someone is a member of the gay class or not.
This breaks the idea of the civil rights movement and the ideals of protected class. If gays can claim protection, based solely on association as a member of the gay class, then anyone can make the same claim and there are no standards of protection for any other protected class. Blacks and women could find themselves being denied basic rights once civil rights have been completely hijacked from under them by gays.
For example, in college admissions, I could claim myself as part of the gay protected class, without actually being a homosexual. College admissions personnel would have to accept my class status, without any proof whatsoever, and place my application on a preferred status. In such a situation, I could push out other preferred status individuals from admissions, even though in reality I have no such claim to protected class status. The same could hold true for hiring practices. If I was not hired for whatever reason, I could sue, claiming discrimination because I was gay. There would be no means of legally establishing my inclusion or exclusion from the gay community and my suit would have to be taken at face value.
The slippery slope exists when other people group themselves together and begin to claim protected class status for the most frivolous of claims. We've already seen the inclusion of lesbianism as a separate class from gays, in addition to people who don't identify with their birth sex or people who have surgically altered their sex. Hence sex has become identified as gender, a subtle step in the gay agenda to create privilege.
Gays and Religion
Another problem with gays hijacking the civil rights movement is the continued attack on religion by the anti-religious. Blacks and women found themselves politically limited, they mounted the civil rights movement against the political institutions that kept them from enfranchisement within the system. But not so with gays.
Gays have had few recent barriers to political disfranchisement. The HIV virus has become more or less treatable and the threat of AIDS (though not AIDS itself) has diminished to the point where it has dropped off the political scale of visibility. Understanding that identity politics requires an oppressor, gays have now identified religion as its primary enemy. Within its social construct, gays have had to attack religion in order to maintain their oppressed status. They've developed another social construct out of religious opposition to create an “us versus them” identification. In doing so, gays have stereotyped religion and reduced its practitioners to the status of bigoted idiots.
The religious have understandably pushed back, refusing to be demonized and stereotyped by people who claim personal enlightenment and freedom from all bigotry, except of course when it comes to any attempt to accept or understand religious people. Neither Blacks nor women have resorted to demonizing another protected class (the religious) to create a protected class.
It surprises me that Blacks and women haven't caught on to the fact that gays are hijacking civil rights. No longer about educational equality or equal pay, civil rights has become, in the eyes of gays, a war cry for social acceptance and unrestrained behavior in the name of fundamental rights – far beyond the desire for civil rights. Gays will eventually break the civil rights movement to create a meaningless system, one that could also undermine the gains Blacks and women enjoy today in the US.
0 comments:
Post a Comment