Last night, while I was at work, I read an interview in this months Attitude magazine with Jane Lynch, the wonderfully wicked Sue Sylvester from Glee. In it she opines on the current level of acceptance of gays in "polite" society, and she makes a lot of sense:
"It's almost like we're going back to the time when we had to decide whether to abolish slavery. "Do we get rid of the gays, or do we accept them and weave them into the fabric of our society?" Our history tells us we ultimately weave everyone in the fabric of society, though, so I think it's just a matter of time."
It's an amazingly astute observation that I had never considered before.
Being a member of a "minority" can makes you focus on all the negative points, and to achieve equality someone has to be focused on these things. Looking at the big picture though, every minority who do not harm others by their actions eventually get accepted into the majority, while retaining their individual differences. It just takes time.
If you take a look at moments in history, such as the Nazi's attempted extermination of non-Aryan people (Jewish, gay, black, Romany etc), it ultimately didn't work, and resulted in these groups eventually becoming stronger, having more sympathy than before and becoming more visible. The same goes for the attempted genocides in
Contrary to how that last section may sound I am not condoning attempted genocide as an acceptable tactic for strengthening society, quite the contrary. The lesson to be learned is that wiping out a section of society that you do not like will not work. The best way forward is to find a way, however abhorrent you may find it at the present time, to accept everyone into society in some way because they are going to be there, in one form or another, no matter what actions you take.
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