"Morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not...

[marmar]

..... the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human... No people will be truly free till all are free." - Benedetto Croce


I'm an African-American male, descendant of a long line of people who've been enslaved, murdered, hosed down, beaten and goodness-knows-what-else in the quest for equality, and who still suffer from discrimination today. But you know what, that doesn't give my civil rights ascendancy over a gay man who lives in a state where he can be fired for being who he is, or a lesbian in Florida who by law can't adopt a child.
These "my-oppression-is-greater-than-your-oppression" threads are tiresome. As Harvey Milk once said (I'm paraphrasing): For too long, the traditional ethnic minorities and the gays have fought for the crumb. It's time that they link together.

:grouphug:

[TygrBright]

1. Amen. And that is exactly the point MLK was starting to make...

...so they had to take him out. Bad enough that those uppity black folks stood up for themselves. But whatever is a rich white powerbroker to do when ALL of the people who have been screwed by the system that created him band together and demand respect for their humanity?

Heavens, we can't have THAT!

MUCH better to keep them brown folks and uppity wimmin and Jews and Mooslims and humma-humma-hummasexshoools slanging each other off over who gets the biggest crumbs falling from the powerbrokers' table.

wisely,
Bright

[marmar]

9. "other off over who gets the biggest crumbs falling from the powerbrokers' table"

Exactly. Collectively, those groups are the majority, by far. The power structure stays in power by keeping them fighting.

[belladonna]

2. Well said

K&R

[ninkasi]

3. Well put

You're right, we should all have the same rights. We are all human, and all deserve equal treatment. The ones who hate, though, seem to have an overwhelming need to have some group to look down on and discriminate against. They are the ones who cause pain for the rest of us.

[marmar]

4. Agree. I don't know what it is about human nature....

but everyone has to have someone to kick.

[PurpleChez]

6. Hear, hear!

Both yours and the OP -- nicely, succinctly said

[peacebird]

5. excellent post! k&r...

[NMMNG]

7. Thank you

Civil rights are Civil Rights, and nobody's rights take precedence over anybody else's.

[silverweb]

8. Well said.

What I routinely ask those who express bigotry of any sort is, "What part of 'Liberty and Justice for ALL' don't you understand?"

[jwirr]

10. A very good point. I remember when I was working with Native

Americans in the 70s there was a similar idea. The African-Americans had been used against the Native-Americans and vise versa for generations, forced to compete for resources and even used to fight wars against each other. All for the benefit of the white man. Some wondered what would happen if they combined forces to set the matters right. The march on Washington where MLK told us about his dream came very close to that ideal.

[ninkasi]

11. I think it's important to realize

that it's the ones in power who encourage the distrust and hatred of ones who are considered, for whatever reason, "different". If all of us agreed that we are all human, and all deserve the same rights, then we might spend some of the energy some spend in hating, into uniting for the good of us all.

The rich and the powerful are the ones goading the negative images that hate thrives on. Imagine, if we all agreed to respect the equal rights of others, and placed our time and energy into righting social injustices in the economic system, how much we could accomplish.

Instead of hating immigrants for coming in and taking jobs, if wages were raised overall, there would be fewer people risking breaking the law to immigrate. If we all accepted that sexual preferences and identification are programmed in us before birth, and therefore, normal for those who are not heterosexual, we could spend the time, energy, and money spent on demonizing gays into spending the money to benefit the community.

If we could agree that the color of a person's skin is largely determined by an evolutionary process...people living in hot climates had a need to have darker skin than a person living in a cold climate...the color of one's skin would be just that...an adaptation made thousands of years ago, but having nothing to do with intelligence, morals, or anything else of importance.

As far as religion, there it gets trickier, because there is no appeal to logic possible. I think, though, that if society as a whole could be uplifted by making the economic policies more fair, fewer people would be attracted, through feelings of hopelessness and desperation, to a religion which preaches hatred of those who are different.

There is really no justification for holding any group of people inferior. It certainly does nothing to help the poor, or the shrinking middle class, but does have benefits for the ones in positions of power who wish to hold onto their power, and use divisions between groups which should, logically, be allies.

Just speaking from my own personal experiences, my life has been much richer due to friends of different colors and nationalities, and from my gay and lesbian friends. We are attracted by having the same viewpoints on many things, and maybe differing on some, but never in an ugly way. To me, hell would be a world where everybody was the same as me...white, heterosexual, and female. If that were an ideal life for me, I would be a hermit and hold conversations with myself in a mirror.