It is no longer a casual concern for a few individuals to get riled up about with megaphones and handmade signs, chanting phrases we’re all tired of hearing.
These attacks are becoming personal and irrefutably more degrading as society supposedly becomes more progressive.
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
And if the great crusader for equality of the ‘60s was right, all of us should fear for our lives, for we find ourselves now facing overt and subliminal homophobia the majority of society does little to stop.
UF and the rest of the world celebrated National Coming Out Day Monday, encouraging oppressed LGBTQ youth to admit to their peers and everyone else who will listen that they are, in fact, neighbors in this acronymic community. While we support the event and are thrilled to see our peers professing pride, we are left with a bitter taste at the necessity of such an event.
First, we wonder why participants in UF’s Coming Out Day feel forced to admit their differences to a larger community that has long thrived on taking their rights away or watched silently as it happened — as if the right to marry, adopt children, serve in the military, inherit benefits or walk in the street openly were inherently reserved for the heterosexual population.
And secondly, we are forced with the realization that such an event really is necessary. As society is forced to react to and face the truth Tyler Clementi revealed to an indifferent and uninformed country, the grim realities gay youth face every day are becoming increasingly palpable.
But the greatest injustice we face as UF celebrated its own Coming Out Day in the days following Clementi’s horrifically disconsolate act is the truth that suicides among gay teens happen at an increasingly alarming rate.
The greatest injustice we face is not watching eight New York City adults repeatedly dehumanize another human being by shoving miniature baseball bats and the ends of plungers into his rectum for being gay last week. It’s the fact that the majority of us remain silent in the face of more psychologically painful prejudices such as a New York gubernatorial hopeful blatantly and unabashedly saying it’s wrong to have children “brainwashed” into thinking homosexuality is an acceptable option.
The greatest injustice we face is remaining silent in the face of such blatant and unwarranted hatred. The greatest injustice we face is continuing to label the persecuted the problem and the plague while the persecutor retains power.
We have reached a point where each and every one of us should ask what right we have to take the opportunity to love, marry and pursue happiness from others.
These rights to love openly and legally, the right heterosexuals have claimed as their own in the vast majority of states, are inherently not and have never been reserved for those so divinely privileged to be heterosexual.
It’s time for the rest of us to come out. It’s time for us to realize injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
