Gay Rights: Until All Love is Equal

I hardly ever talk about where I live on here. Even though I was born in Tennessee I know live in West Michigan, near the city of Grand Rapids. I moved here around 10 years ago with my family. For people that aren’t aware of what this area is like all I can say is that it is predominately conservative. Now two things have been going on in this area over the last several months that I feel need to be addressed. Both involve the city of Holland, which is on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. The first issue involved the Holland city council voting and subsequently voting down an ordinance that would outlaw discrimination based on sexual preference and the second one is more recent and involves the organization Until Love is Equal (check them out here) and the controversy over them buying billboard space. So let’s look at these individually.

As I said, several months ago, the Holland city council put to a vote that would outlaw discriminating based on sexual preference. While this was mostly in regard to employers, it also extended to housing and other areas as well. I want you to really let this sink it because it’s amazing to me that anyone would not want this to pass. As the law sits at this moment, if you work for a company and they find out about your sexual preferences and they don’t like it, they can fire you. Anti-gay advocates approve of the council striking down of this law but there is one thing that they overlook, the same thing can happen to straight people as well. What I mean is, if you can fire or deny someone a residence or employment because they are gay, wouldn’t the same be true of someone who is not gay. So what they have to ask themselves is how would they feel if they were called into their boss’s office tomorrow and told that they were being let go because they found out they were straight? Now the chances of that happening are quite slim but all I know is that if you can discriminate one group for something, than you can do it to any group.

The billboard issue is a bit more recent. It started a few weeks ago when the story broke that Until Love is Equal was denied the use of billboards because the company, CBS Outdoor, didn’t want their billboards used to spread the pro-gay message. Since then CBS Outdoor has changed their minds and will run the billboard, claiming it was a misunderstanding.

Since the initial report, the local newspaper, the Grand Rapids Press, has published multiple letters, mostly from people who appear to be anti-gay, and there was one published today (October 31st, 2011) that was the catalyst I needed to write this op/ed. I won’t reprint the entire letter (I would post a link but I can’t find it online) but basically what the writer was saying was that “this group (Until Love is Equal) doesn’t want love to be equal because it already is. What they want is for sodomy to be equal.”

I’ll be honest; I was completely floored when I read the entire letter. For starters, not all gays commit the act of sodomy. Obviously I can’t speak for gay males but I do have a few gay male friends, one of whom is the father of my children, two of those three are in a relationship together and they have never had “sex” with each other, even though they have been a couple for about a year. We’ve all talked and they just aren’t interested in having a relationship like that. They prefer to just be together because they love each other. Now that’s not to say that they don’t have any physical intimacy, after all, there is more ways to be physically intimate then just having sex. The second thing that pops out to me is that the letter and most letters to the paper that are talking about the “sins of homosexuality” seem to completely look over the fact that there are gay women, AKA lesbians. So what would they have to say about lesbians wanting their love to be equal to straight couples? They can’t fall back on the sodomy argument because lesbians cannot perform sodomy on one another, except with the aid of an adult novelty. The truth is, whether they want to admit it or not, love in this country is not equal. How can it be, when a man and woman can be in Las Vegas, meet each other and literally be able to get married to each other in less than hour, meanwhile, two men or women who love each other and have committed to be with each through every hard ship imaginable can’t?

I know this won’t change most people’s minds one way or the other; all I ask is that you think what things would be like if you were in the minority and all you want is to have the same rights as everyone else.