| By Tanya Paperny - May 23rd, 2008 at 4:54 pm EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Tags: lgbt, LGBT rights, LGBTQ, Marriage, marriage equality, michigan, minnesota
Organizations in both Michigan and Minnesota saw sharp spikes in anti-LGBT violence over the last year.
I'm always one to criticize mainsteam LGBT organizations for putting marriage equality as their first priority, ignoring ongoing social issues that don't get solved by a "civil rights" fight. Issues like anti-gay violence.
However, the Minnesota report from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs notes that the occurrence of violent incidents "appeared to mirror political events, particularly the push for a constitutional amendment barring legal recognition of same-sex couples."
Their report is unclear about how violence and political changes correlate, but this might discount my feelings if legal changes about LGBT people do impact the way people behave at an interpersonal level.
One state is doing something about anti-gay violence:
Maryland just became the 11th state to enact an anti-bullying law based on sexual harassment, and the seventh to include protections based on gender identity.
!
Comments are closed for this post.
...maybe you shouldn't be? You haven't laid out a case here for why anti-gay violence is a bigger issue than gay marriage, just asserted that the organizations actually working on these issues should magically solve everything at once.
The Maryland law sounds like a good step in the right direction.
I understand your sentiments and appreciate them. However, I also see the LGBT movement as one that is not just limited one or the other - that we as allies don't have to pick. Just as 3rd-wave feminism encompasses many issues, the LGBT movement can be the same.
One issue I think we need to take on, that I've not seen a whole lot of, is sexuality education directly mainly at the LGBT community. Too often, such efforts, even when started by the pro-comprehensive sex education camp, still frame sex as penis-in-vagina, heterosexual issue. Until we recognize that homosexuals, too, have the rights to a healthy and happy sex life, through advocating safe sex, we've still got a lot of issues to take on.