The piece below appears courtesy Laurie Voss of Seldo.com, who wrote it in honour of the It Gets Better Project and speficially for gay teens in T&T
Hi. So I know this is several paragraphs long and you were born into the age of YouTube so you may not get to the end of this. In which case, here’s the summary: it gets better. It’s really bad now, it may even get worse, it will become unbearable, but somehow you’ll bear it anyway. And then it will get better.
Or, why even in spite of Blair, I back the Brits.
I quote AndrewSullivan:
A carefully drafted civil registration scheme could command support from people of all political affiliations and of none. By instinct, Tories are, rightly, wary of change – especially change based on abstract egalitarian theorising. But we accept changes that remove justified grievances, that tackle particular problems affecting people in their daily lives. So I appeal to my fellow Conservatives, inside and outside Parliament, to see the case for civil partnership. Changing the law, in this case, is not about political correctness. It is about personal decency. A law that effectively pretends gay couples don’t exist is indefensible. As we do at our best, let us accept the need for change and concentrate on the detail of a Bill to improve the lot of a sizeable minority of our fellow citizens.
That strikes me as a genuinely conservative statement. The Brits, with their usual pragmatism, will avoid the stark moral arguments of Americans – pro and con – and go about fixing an obvious legal anomaly. It seems inevitable that Britain will have gay marriage in effect by the fall. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart makes the same pragmatic step. Are we reaching a “tipping point”?
“It is about personal decency”
Yes. Yes. Exactly.
