Whoa! These Are "Conservatives"?

Interesting post at AmericaBlog on one of the speakers at CPAC. Here's the video:



Getting booed by conservatives for attacking gays? Am I on the right planet?

Aravosis' post is pretty powerful:

No one wants Sarah Palin to be President. But we're talking about our civil rights. I think a lot of straight Democrats don't get that. They see out and proud gay people, a lot of us have good jobs, nice clothes, get to travel the world (and a lot of us don't, but they don't ever meet them), so they think our civil rights battle is some kind of champagne party to us, as if we're doing it for fun because we really have everything we could ever want. Well, anyone who thinks that didn't grow up gay. They didn't grow up thinking they were a pervert. That they were sick. That they'd never find love, never get married, never have children or a family of their own - because God made them wrong. They didn't grow up thinking they'd have to kill themselves once they hit the age of 30 because they'd be single, and people would 'figure out' that they were gay, and then they'd lose all their friends and family and their job and career. And they knew they couldn't live with that.

That last point is important. Pick any political issue, any political constituency, and ask yourself how many of those issues, how many of those people, considered killing themselves over their issue. Not a lot, I'm guessing. Now you're starting to understand why gay civil rights advocates, why gay people, care so fervently about their "issue." It's not just an issue for us. It's our lives.

All I can add is "Yeah -- been there."

I've been reading a lot of BL manga, as you are no doubt aware. I love it, but thinking about it, there's a particular reason I love it -- call it revisiting my youth. I would have given my arm to have something like that available when I was a teenager -- something that told me it was OK to love another boy, that I was a normal person who was entitled to be treated just like everyone else, and that there were stories about people like me who didn't kill themselves at the end.

Aravosis is right -- it's about more than civil rights.