My civil rights vs someone else's. [View All]

[lumberjack_jeff]

I'm proud of Hillary Clinton and what her candidacy demonstrated about the progress of civil rights in this country as it pertains to gender. I'm elated about the election, about President Barack Obama and what that says about the state of civil rights as it pertains to ethnic minorities in the US.

I am very disappointed about proposition 8 and what it says about civil rights as it pertains to sexual minorities.

I think that for too long, americans have been predisposed to discriminate between "important" civil rights and "trivial" civil rights. Sadly, affinity politics factors into this greatly. Exit polls show that ethnic minorities voted for prop 8 in a big way. They also show that a great many women voted for it. It has not been demonstrated to them that the struggle for civil rights is bigger than just one or two narrowly defined groups.

We're not immune from that phenomenon here. When I expressed to a LGBT DU'er my feeling that rights for people with developmental disabilities is one of the last frontiers of civil rights, his response was "no, people with developmental disabilities already have more rights than LGBT people do". I don't want to debate that issue, but I do think that it is illustrative of the bigger problem.

Look, we all want people to pull our wagon, myself included. In order to obtain that help, we can't indulge in the kind of finger-pointing I've seen here today. We must rejoice in the victory for the AA community, and work to recruit allies to the broader cause of civil rights.