I attended college a little later in than most people. I had already served 10 years in the Navy and had a family of my own when I entered as a freshman. Showing up to college after that many years in the military was a definite shock to the system. I was under the impression that the primary mission of the school I attended was education. In a lot of ways it wasn’t, but I went with it and stayed out of the way of the wokesters.
One of the issues that kept floating around was gay rights. On the face of it it sounds great. I have no issue with people getting equal rights, that is one of the reasons the military exists, to protect equality. I could get on board with that.
As a college freshman, I had to take all of the basic classes, English 101 among them. The professor had us write a paper on why it was important for Gay and Lesbian people to have equal rights. I thought that assignment was simple enough, so away I went. I though I would provide some examples of what they didn’t have, that I (as a white dude) did.
Marriage as a Right
One of the issues raised in class was marriage. They gay community can’t marry who they want to. Sounds like a fair point. But the various laws around marriage don’t address who you “want” to marry. They define it other ways. I brought up the point in class and was lambasted by the professor. She said that I was just fortunate (privileged) that the law aligned with what I happened to want. The truth of that statement was that it happened to align with me, but there was no disparity in rights. I could marry a woman, as well as a gay man could.
The argument seemed to be that we needed to define marriage differently. I went the other direction and asked, why do we let the government define it at all? The arguments that flow from there are all legal ones. Insurance coverage, medical issues, divorce, etc. All of those things can be done contractually, without invoking marriage. It is just that the government got into the business of social engineering that has created a perception of unequal rights.
Other Rights Bestowed
Marriage is just one issue though. So to look for holes in my argument I jumped onto the ACLU website. They have a page that talks about knowing your rights as an LGBTQ person. Here is the list of issues that you can select from: