General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: My sexual orientation is being used as a political fucking football. 43 years of this crap. [View all]Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)I don't know UK politics all that well but I'm guessing that the dynamics are the same and that there will someday be an openly gay or lesbian Prime Minister.
You beat us to the punch with putting a woman in charge but we got there first with a racial minority. Now for sexual orientation -- ready, set, go!
The point is to respond to your comment, "I'm afraid I've sort of resigned myself to the idea that this is probably how it will always be." Because I'm straight (and a white male), I haven't had to put up with any of the BS you detail. I don't have that personal perspective. As an observer, though, I see prejudice definitely weakening. It would once have been almost inconceivable that a woman would be considered a serious possibility for the Presidency, let alone that a black would actually be elected. Same-sex marriage wasn't even being brought up as an issue a few decades ago, and now scores of millions of Americans live in states with marriage equality.
I leave with you with an excerpt from the Wikipedia biography of Theodore Parker, one of the leading opponents of slavery in the 1850s.
Parker predicted the inevitable success of the abolitionist cause this way:
"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."[26]
A century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. paraphrased these words to great effect in his famous "Where Do We Go From Here?" speech of August 1967 to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, when he said, "The arc of the Moral Universe Is long, but It bends toward Justice".