If you think your religion requires discrimination, you're probably misreading your faith.
Love should never mean having to live in fear.
The world could use more love. Why deny it to others?
People think that LGBTs adopting children will hurt them, but it's not being in loving homes that hurts children most.
What does love mean if we would deny it to others?
I've fought for religious freedom and I can tell you that anti-gay 'religious freedom' bills aren't it.
Today's 'religious freedom' policies should not be seen as a problem limited to LGBT people but as a co-optation of religion that affects us all.
Sometimes I still feel that there are two of me: one clean, flawless picture, the other imperfect and cracked; one boy, one girl; one voice that speaks aloud and one that whispers in my ear; one publicly known to have been troubled but be on the mend, the other who has privately lost something to do with innocence and gained something to do with knowledge and adulthood that can never be undone. I feel sometimes there are things that tear me in two directions, that there are two sets of thoughts that grow side by side. But then I realize that I am whole, whatever that means and does not mean; I am complete without the need for additions or alteration.
Light bursts behind my closed eyes, so intensely I nearly hear the popping sound. It's my brain melting, or my world ending, or maybe we've just been hit by a meteor and this is the rapture and I'm given one last perfect moment before I'm sent to purgatory and he;s sent somewhere much, much better.It isn't his first kiss - I know that - but it's his first real one.
The things that I love about you aren't going to go away when you go on your book tour, and they're not going to go away when you go on your mission. I'll still be here, and I'll still be thinking about all those things. I'll still be working on being a better person, a better friend, a better son. I'll still be wondering what it would be like to be a better boyfriend for you. And you will be on your mission, thinking about how much you wish your weren't gay.
Building bridges takes us further than building walls.
What does religious freedom mean if we would use it as a cover for hate and privilege?
It's terrifying to think you could become the next statistic.
Privilege is when you contribute to the oppression of others and then claim that you are the one being discriminated against.
What matters most is not 'what' you are, but 'who' you are.
Inside my chest, my lungs are wild animals, clawing at the cage."Oh, man," Autumn mumbles from beside me. "His smile makes me stupid."Her words are a dim echo of my own thoughts: His smile ruins me. The feeling makes me uneasy, a dramatic lurch that tells me I need to have him or I won't be okay.
Tolerance of intolerance enables oppression.
Reducing a group to a slur or stereotype reduces us all.
I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.
I know what I am. I know that I've chosen to identify as a transgender woman, and that I am - by and large - happy with where I am in this world. I'm far from perfect, and I could give you a list as long as my arms of the things I'd love to change. Nevertheless, I am still here, and I am still me, and no one can change that without my permission.-Gwendolyn Ann Smith, "We're All Someone's Freak
Instead of saying that all gender is this or all gender id that, let's recognize that the word gender has scores of meanings built into it. It's an amalgamation of bodies, identities, and life experiences, subconscious urges, sensations, and behaviours, some of which develop organically, and others which are shaped by language and culture. Instead of saying that gender is any one single thing, let's start describing it as a holistic experience.
I personally believe that gender equality underlines every other equality, and certainly the issue of sexuality. For instance, if we didn’t distinguish between gender, in terms of giving different genders disparate values and attributes, what problem would we have with two men loving each other?
— Do they know? That you're gay?— Why waste their time with it? It's not like it'll ever be an issue anyway.— Yeah, but, it's who you are, right?— I guess so, — he said. — I don't really know how to be any way else.— When did you know?— I was twelve, maybe. Something I just knew one day, even though I hadn't known it the day before.— So it's like that, huh? A feeling? Not just being into other dudes?— Oh no, it's that too. Of course it's that. But it's more, I think. Not so much a feeling as a fact, like having blue eyes or brown hair. It's just maybe something you don't discover until you're ready to understand it better.— Like being straight, — she said. Only we don't have to deal with all that closet bullshit.— Bingo, — he said.
Creed scowls. "Hardly. All he does now is mope like a goddamn teenage girl. Anytime I'm home, he's in his room with the door locked. I'm telling you guys, he got worked over really bad in San Diego. I thought the whole point of having a gay brother was that they were supposed to be all cool and shit. I got a defective gay.
Gay rights aren't predicated on being born gay or having the right gene. Gay rights are predicated on having choice and consent. If you're a man and you can find another man that consents to have sex with you, it's the consent that gives you the right to have sex with him. Genetics are irrelevant when it comes to sexual rights. Just as gay rights are based on choice and consent, so are prostitution rights. All sexual rights are based on choice and consent.
When we hide discrimination under the guise of 'religious freedom,' we make a mockery of human rights.
Trauma or no, I would have been trans no matter what body I'd been born with. Tell the doctors that we exist for the health of humanity, which needs to find wholeness and belief in complexity. Girl in boy's body or boy inside a girl; call it fate or biology, will, or spiritual choice. But I was not born in the wrong body.-Scott Turner Schofield, "The Wrong Body
It wasn't the first time I'd been with someone, but it was different this time. Maybe it was because when I told them I was bisexual they weren't like the girls who thought I was *really* a lesbian; they weren't like the boys who thought it was hot. Maybe it was because when they told me they were genderqueer I just said that I knew and they cried as they smiled at me. Or maybe it was just because our limbs fit together, maybe because it tasted like salt water and was the colour of sunlight through grass. Or maybe it was just all these things.