I just read an interesting article in The Huffington Post by Jeff Kelly Lowenstein. In it, he quotes Malcolm X’s thoughts on the civil rights movement of his time: “I will never say that progress is being made. If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out three inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, there’s no progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made, and they haven’t even begun to pull the knife out, much less try and heal the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.”
Today’s civil rights movement
He articulates the progress and how far we have to go far better than I could. Read his article. It is worth the few minutes it will take. I’ve been the mom of a gay son for 44 years and known it for 24 years. If you had told me 20 years ago we would even be talking about gay marriage, much less have it available in 10 states, I wouldn’t have believed you. I wouldn’t have even believed that states would have found it necessary to ban it. It wasn’t even a thought. We were fighting the AIDS crisis and trying to educate the public that you couldn’t get it from hugging or being in the same room with someone with HIV. That crisis, in my humble opinion, brought the gay and lesbian community together in a way it had never been before. United, the community now fights for rights that seemed impossible a decade ago. From where I sit, it feels like progress, but I’m not a lesbian and I haven’t been impacted.
Should marriage become legal in California for my son, I will celebrate, believe me. But I won’t be satisfied. Full equality for the LGBT community, and that includes transgender individuals, is a long way off.
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