Yeah, if the title doesn't explain enough, basically I just had an experience yesterday and for some reason I felt like the appropriate response was to blog about it.
I'm staying with my uncle for fall break, and so I got picked up at the train station in San Luis Obispo on Saturday evening by him and a friend of his, who was driving. We were basically just engaging in polite conversation, and some news came up that his friend was surprised I hadn't heard about. I told them that I don't follow a lot of news right now, because I'm in college, except for GLBT news because I'm taking a course in it. I mentioned as an example the incident in Tricia's latest blog post about the lesbian couple being kicked out of a mall for kissing. And that's where things got kind of interesting, because my uncle's friend responded by telling a story of how he was at court for a parking ticket recently, and there were two lesbians kissing and hugging in the courtroom before the proceedings started, ending this story by saying "There's a place for it" in what was really a disapproving tone. I wanted to tell him that yes, there was a place for it and it was called wherever they wanted, but I didn't say anything about it because I barely knew the guy and I didn't want to make the rest of the drive awkward. But it bothered me, because no matter how much I try to, I really can't seem to wrap my head around people who feel that way. Why is it that two girls have less right to kiss in public than a girl and a guy? I mean, marriage rights and federal protections aside, shouldn't the LGBT community at least be afforded the ability to be in public without being openly judged by now?
Maybe I'm overreacting, but it got under my skin. I've lived most of my life in an environment where at least the right of gay and lesbian couples to exist was recognized with few people being openly bigoted or uncomfortable about it. I realize that my little corner of the world is not at all like the rest of the world, but because I was always just raised to believe that men loving men or women loving women was a totally natural phenomenon, it still shocks me when I remember that the rest of the world does not agree with me.
Hannah, I agree with you on that the LGBT community should have the right to express their feelings publicly like the rest of us. But also straight people are sometimes criticized by PDA. I strongly agree that EVERYONE should be able to show public affection without being judged whether it is between a male-female, female-female or male-male. Not everyone thinks the same way and maybe what we think is okay, others might think it is immoral. Lets just hope for the best.
ReplyDeleteI would like to think that the man would have said the same thing about a straight couple, simply because a court room is not really a good place to go at it, regardless... but... that's certainly not always the case. Double standards are a huge issue right now, and we're seeing it in terms of racial inequalities, gender inequalities and orientation inequalities. A lot of these inequalities exist purely because there is such a double-standard that demands, creates, and maintains differences between two groups of people. It's a problem we currently have no solutions to.
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