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and-then-there-were-n0ne · 5 years ago

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We may be living through times of unprecedented change, but in uncertainty lies the power to influence the future. Now is not the time to despair, but to act.

Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons. […]

It is important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and destruction. The hope I am interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It is also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse one. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings. “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naivety,” the Bulgarian writer Maria Popova recently remarked. And Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, early on described the movement’s mission as to “Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation, rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams”. It is a statement that acknowledges that grief and hope can coexist. […]

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterwards either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone. […]

After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many come from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms, mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but it is the less visible long-term organising and groundwork – or underground work – that often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists and participants in social media. To many, it seems insignificant or peripheral until very different outcomes emerge from transformed assumptions about who and what matters, who should be heard and believed, who has rights.

Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they’ve always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it’s compromising: it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly homophobic or racist in a way it no longer is; and it recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of centre stage. Our hope and often our power.

Changing the story isn’t enough in itself, but it has often been foundational to real changes. Making an injury visible and public is usually the first step in remedying it, and political change often follows culture, as what was long tolerated is seen to be intolerable, or what was overlooked becomes obvious. Which means that every conflict is in part a battle over the story we tell, or who tells and who is heard.

“Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair,”the theologian Walter Brueggemann noted. It is an extraordinary statement, one that reminds us that though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats, cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope.

Amnesia leads to despair in many ways. The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view. In other words, when you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change. Those who think that way don’t remember raids on gay bars when being homosexual was illegal, or rivers that caught fire when unregulated pollution peaked in the 1960s or that there were, worldwide, 70% more seabirds a few decades ago. Thus, they don’t recognise the forces of change at work.

One of the essential aspects of depression is the sense that you will always be mired in this misery, that nothing can or will change. There’s a public equivalent to private depression, a sense that the nation or the society rather than the individual is stuck. Things don’t always change for the better, but they change, and we can play a role in that change if we act. Which is where hope comes in, and memory, the collective memory we call history.

The other affliction amnesia brings is a lack of examples of positive change, of popular power, evidence that we can do it and have done it. George Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Controlling the past begins by knowing it; the stories we tell about who we were and what we did shape what we can and will do. Despair is also often premature: it’s a form of impatience as well as of certainty. […]

More broadly, shifts in, say, the status of women are easily overlooked by people who don’t remember that, a few decades ago, reproductive rights were not yet a concept, and there was no recourse for exclusion, discrimination, workplace sexual harassment, most forms of rape, and other crimes against women the legal system did not recognise or even countenance. None of the changes were inevitable, either – people fought for them and won them.

Social, cultural or political change does not work in predictable ways or on predictable schedules. The month before the Berlin Wall fell, almost no one anticipated that the Soviet bloc was going to disintegrate all of a sudden (thanks to many factors, including the tremendous power of civil society, nonviolent direct action and hopeful organising going back to the 1970s), any more than anyone, even the participants, foresaw the impact that the Arab spring or Occupy Wall Street or a host of other great uprisings would have. We don’t know what is going to happen, or how, or when, and that very uncertainty is the space of hope.

Those who doubt that these moments matter should note how terrified the authorities and elites are when they erupt. That fear signifies their recognition that popular power is real enough to overturn regimes and rewrite the social contract. And it often has. Sometimes your enemies know what your friends can’t believe. Those who dismiss these moments because of their imperfections, limitations, or incompleteness need to look harder at what joy and hope shine out of them and what real changes have emerged because of them, even if not always in the most obvious or recognisable ways.

Change is rarely straightforward. Sometimes it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly arise from deep roots in the past or from long-dormant seeds. A young man’s suicide triggers an uprising that inspires other uprisings, but the incident was a spark; the bonfire it lit was laid by activist networks and ideas about civil disobedience, and by the deep desire for justice and freedom that exists everywhere. […]

We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, and of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant stays asleep.

Together we are very powerful, and we have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that, yes, we can change the world because we have many times before. You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.

#society books #books #culture #communities #society #hope #rebecca solnit

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thewebofslime · 6 years ago

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The Pedophile Project: Your 7-Year-Old Is Next On The Sexual Revolution’s Hit Parade We cannot dismiss the campaign to legalize pedophilia as fringy stuff that will get nowhere. It’s real and it’s here and it’s gaining strength. By Stella Morabito FEBRUARY 21, 2019 Activists for normalizing pedophilia are on the move. Public acceptance of adult sex with children is the next domino poised to fall in identity politics. It’s being sustained, among other things, by the rapid sexualization of children in the media and in K-12 education. We cannot dismiss the campaign to legalize pedophilia as fringy stuff that will get nowhere. It’s real and it’s here and it’s gaining strength. It’s a very logical outgrowth of the nihilism inherent in the sexual revolution. If you doubt this, just consider, for example, how unthinkable to many Americans was the recent celebration of infanticide (in the guise of abortion rights) by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Likewise, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam—supposedly a pediatrician—spoke cavalierly about whether to dispose of a living infant who survives abortion. They and governors of many other states are betting that your shock will simply wear off and we’ll all eventually get with the infanticide program. People do tend to settle into such shifts, believing it won’t affect them. But the selective dehumanization of children has been going on for a long time now. Why should we think it’ll be any different when the time comes for legalizing pedophilia? As with any propaganda campaign that pushes outrageous changes on an unwary public, it’s all about timing. Academics might refer to timing as the Overton Window or the Availability Cascade. But we should all be able to understand the process of conditioning the public to accept the unacceptable. First, the groundwork is laid through carefully planned propaganda. There are various types of messaging for various audiences: the medical establishment, the education establishment, legislators, judges, the general public, and so forth. Then the agitation begins with poster people who are “just like you.” And before you know it, it’s all over. Unveiling pedophilia as “just fine” will likely be an ambush if we aren’t prepared. It promises to be as swift as the “transgender tipping point” campaign that shrewdly coincided with the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision in 2015. It will be accompanied by a defiant campaign to paint any resistance as a relic of outdated morality that oppresses the rights of an identity group and the civil rights of any children caught in it. So, when that inevitable time comes, will we just sit back and cower in confusion? Or will ample voices be able to break through the pressures of political correctness beforehand and shout “Enough!” Be prepared to make that happen, because the pitcher is full and they are mixing the Kool-Aid. The Sexualization of Children Is Well Underway We’ve already being desensitized to the sexualization of children and implanting gender confusion in them. Parents from Long Beach, California to Queens, New York are taking their toddlers to drag queen story times at local libraries. Some, like the mother of nine-year-old Lactatia, now actually groom their boys to be drag queens and encourage them to get other children to do the same. Media outlets spread the idea. For example, “Good Morning America” recently celebrated an 11-year-old drag queen who danced suggestively on the show and does the same at adult night clubs. The studio audience looked groomed to be a picture of Middle America. They cheered his gyrations on cue, and approvingly. A majority of American parents are already tacitly okay with sex “education” that pushes early sexual activity on their kids, along with developmentally inappropriate teachings about various sexual practices. They’re also getting on board with having the transgender hoax imposed on their kids, with a bunch of cool moms modeling that behavior. Most parents who are disturbed by all this are overwhelmed and keep their concerns to themselves, which only perpetuates the trend. Our public schools, with the backing of the highly politicized American Academy of Pediatrics, are also now in the business of nudging any young child to get injections of puberty blockers if he or she claims to be transgender. Some states are now threatening to take away custody from any parent who is not on board with that. K-12 classrooms are becoming labs in which kids are being programmed to serve such agendas. Your children have been defined by the left’s sexual nihilists as totally sexual beings. So what next? The logical answer: from sexual beings to sex objects. We may well see even more legalized exploitation of children unimaginable to many Americans today. Let’s face it: Pedophilia has been waiting in the wings, and is itching to come out. So let’s not be blindsided when it hits full force. Designating Pedophilia a Sexual Orientation There are two main avenues to legalizing adult sexual relations with pre-pubescent children: 1) to designate it as a sexual orientation; and 2) to lower—or abolish—the age of consent for sexual activity. Both efforts are on track by pedophilia advocates, especially in academia and in the mass media. Take a look at this TED Talk released last year, in which the speaker chides us: “Let’s be mature about pedophilia.” The speaker, Madeleine Van Der Bruggen, makes the case that pedophilia is simply a sexual orientation that can be neither chosen nor changed. She appeals us to “stop with the hate!” (sound familiar?). She argues that everybody probably knows someone with a pedophilic interest. And, really, they’re just like you. Most don’t talk about it because it’s illegal. Imagine, she asks, if you’re told you could never act on your passion? She implores us to imagine “how lonely” that must be. Yet another TED talk from another young female pushed the same argument. But that talk was taken down by TED, at the request of the speaker. You can still access it here. The academic literature is also getting much bolder by publishing increasing numbers of articles in support of both avenues: designation as sexual orientation and re-considering age of consent. Perhaps most shocking to people of conscience is the December 2018 article by convicted British child molester Tom O’Carroll that was published in the peer-reviewed journal Sexuality and Culture. More on that later. You can find an extensive bibliography of such articles in popular media. In arguments to push social acceptance of adult sex with prepubescent children you will find nearly an exact parallel to all of the arguments for all manner of “progressive” causes, including, of course, LGBT preferences. There has also been a rash of publishing in popular magazines. The idea of the “virtuous pedophile” was unveiled in Todd Nickerson’s Salon article “I’m a Pedophile, but not a Monster.” Salon actually removed the article, although it’s still archived on the internet. Nickerson says he would never act on his urge and never has. He also has a website called “Virtuous Pedophile,” ostensibly for helping celibate pedophiles resist their urges. You can find an extensive bibliography of such articles in popular media if you don’t mind visiting the “virtuous pedophile” website. Typical titles include a 2016 New York Magazine article, “What’s it like to be a celibate pedophile?” or a 2016 Vice article entitled “Realizing You’re a Pedophile Can Make you Want to Kill Yourself.” Then there’s the “born that way” defense, as discussed in this BBC news item entitled “Are Paedophiles’ Brains Wired Differently?” Born This Way Shouldn’t Seal the Deal I don’t question the need for people to get the help they need to avoid engaging in destructive behaviors. We should all have mercy for those who struggle, especially people who feel utterly rejected and demonized by society, particularly if they want to regulate any wild urges that would hurt others, especially kids. The argument in all of the above is that pedophilia is a sexual orientation that is not chosen. The sad irony is that when people feel so marginalized and dehumanized, especially if they are unnecessarily barraged with humiliations, when they finally get what they want they tend to take revenge. They cannot distinguish between kind people of goodwill who have legitimate critiques of their demands and the bullies who embittered them in the past. So be prepared: simply having an opposite opinion will get you marked as an enemy, even if you always treated every human being with compassion and dignity. If you cave to political correctness, you are allowing your goodwill to be weaponized against all you stand for. So here we are. The argument in all of the above is that pedophilia is a sexual orientation that is not chosen. So if we accept it as such, wouldn’t any therapist who didn’t affirm the orientation be accused of “conversion therapy?” Would pedophiles even be permitted to get help? Finally, whether or not you want to believe the warnings of former child actor Corey Feldman, there can be no doubt that Hollywood has a good share of pedophiles. “An Open Secret” is a 2015 documentary about it by Amy Berg. We should not be surprised in the future when Hollywood gives pedophilia a final Caitlyn Jenner-styled juggernaut to push it all over the top. Again, it’s all about the timing. APA Will Ultimately Decide How to Classify Pedophilia Just as the American Psychiatric Association (APA) re-classified gender identity disorder to gender identity dysphoria, it also tinkered with classifying pedophilia in its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V.) As the psycho-bible of mental disorders, the DSM has always been the go-to source for making the sexual revolution the law of the land. Its reclassifications of homosexuality and transgenderism are really just the beginning. All that remains is for the medical establishment to officially proclaim that pedophilia is a sexual orientation. There is no reason other than timing to think it won’t do the same for pedophilia. Currently, the DSM makes a distinction between pedophilia as a paraphilia (a desire not acted upon) versus “pedophilic disorder” (actual child molestation.) But the lines in society sure feel like they’re blurring. In 2013 the APA “erroneously” referred to pedophilia as a sexual orientation on page 698 of the first printing of the DSM-V. After a public outcry, the APA said it would correct the error in subsequent printings, changing the term “sexual orientation” to “sexual interest.” Their public relations folks also added for good measure that the APA still considers acts of pedophilic disorder to be criminal. Okay. But ask yourself this: With all of the meticulous attention the APA applies to every controversial aspect of the DSM, and the bated breath the news media holds for any new edition, how exactly does a reference to pedophilia as a “sexual orientation” end up in there by accident? Sadly, the error smells more like a trial balloon. Both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association have long been politicized to promote every outgrowth of the sexual revolution. Groupthink is deeply embedded in both organizations. Bottom line here: if you track the promotion of pedophilia in academia and the media, all that remains is for the medical establishment to officially proclaim that pedophilia is a sexual orientation. Then anti-discrimination laws kick in to protect it in its entirety, and children are at the mercy of some judge’s interpretation of “penumbras” to determine what constitutes harm. The Farce of a Child’s ‘Right to Choose’ The other turning point in legalizing pedophilia would come with repeated claims in public discourse that prepubescent kids can enjoy and consent to sexual relationships with adults. Furthermore, denying children this avenue of expression with adults, the argument goes, violates their civil rights. Perhaps the biggest bombshell recently is that December 2018 article mentioned above, written by convicted child molester Tom O’Carroll in the peer reviewed journal Sexuality and Culture. The title of the article is “Childhood ‘Innocence’ is not Ideal: Virtue Ethics and Child-Adult Sex.” At the outset, he puts the word “innocence” in scare quotes. If you don’t want too much of a soak in that sewer, you can look over a good review of O’Carroll’s demented reasoning in Justin Lee’s article written in Arc, “The Pedophile Apologist,” or see Rod Dreher’s commentary. O’Carroll’s goal is to make the case that pedophilia is simply a sexual orientation that should have all the protections of anti-discrimination laws for other sexualities. In his article, O’Carroll masquerades as a philosopher. He takes on Kant and Aristotle. Like a Chihuahua barking furiously at the ocean, O’Carroll also attempts to bash the impeccable scholarship of Sir Roger Scruton. O’Carroll’s goal is to make the case that pedophilia is simply a sexual orientation that should have all the protections of anti-discrimination laws for other sexualities. He tries to appeal to the same litany of arguments that subjects children to early sexualization and to the transgender curriculum: that kids can decide for themselves how to express themselves and shouldn’t be denied a choice in how they identify—no matter how young they are. He lets loose a panoply of arguments strongly suggesting we should lower or abolish the age of consent: that children shouldn’t be denied any form of sexual expression; that allowing them the full range of sexual expression actually promotes their flourishing and development; and that stigmatizing pedophilia is in the same class as stigmatizing people on the basis of their race, sex, religion, or, naturally, their sexual orientation, which he argues pedophilia is. To object to any of the above is, in a word, “hate.” (Sound familiar?) So get used to it: the goal is to frame pedophilia as a human right, redirecting your attention away from the adult and reframing it as a child’s right to sexual expression. If the child claims to consent, who are you to get in his or her way? Hence, every child becomes fair game for child molesters, especially if the child can be persuaded and influenced to say he or she consented. Undue influence is a cult-like dynamic to which children are particularly vulnerable. Worse is that there are recent studies by Bruce Rind published in the academic journal The Archives of Sexual Behavior, claiming there is no long-term harm to adult sex with children. (As O’Carroll also claims, the positive effects on children is a growing field of inquiry.) You can read about it in a 2017 Public Discourse article by Mark Regnerus. Otherwise, the silence is deafening. The issue of consent has been made murky, especially when trying to clarify cases of he-said-she-said in accusations of sexual harassment or assault. But if you accept the claim that children can consent to sex with adults, then it seems we must now take their word for it, and never question if that “consent” was coerced. In addition, our society seems increasingly ignorant about the causes and effects of undue influence caused by a disparity in power between two actors in a relationship. Any substantive discussion of this element in human dynamics is fading fast. Yet it ought to be common knowledge. Undue influence is a cult-like dynamic to which children are particularly vulnerable. The ‘Equality Act’ Would Protect Pedophilia Just about all of today’s so-called “anti-discrimination” laws include sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) classifications. Once pedophilia is classified as a sexual orientation, then it’s protected under that umbrella, which covers all areas of life: employment, education, medicine, housing, business, military, even the parish life of churches, family life, and much more. If pedophilia is ever classified as a sexual orientation, wouldn’t the Equality Act afford it federal protection? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced that a big priority for this Congress is to get the “Equality Act” passed. So the big question is this: If pedophilia is ever classified as a sexual orientation, wouldn’t the Equality Act afford it federal protection? Seems logical. What am I missing here? If that happens, then any objection to a known pedophile teaching at any level in any school or daycare center would have to be considered illegal discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. There can be no doubt pedophilia will eventually be officially classified as a “sexual orientation” if more people don’t grow some spine. You don’t have to be a master of logic to understand that once that happens, then expressions of disapproval will be deemed illegal discrimination. So, are you going to be one of the folks in the morning show audience applauding the sexualization of your child? Will you just get used to it? Or will you take a stand? Time is running out. You Bigoted Pedophobe! No person of conscience can allow this sinister pedophilia project to gain any more momentum. If we do, it will produce an unexpected avalanche of comings-out with an aggressive campaign complete with poster children (and their parents!) to support it. This is no more a conspiracy theory than to say the same thing about the transgender project in 2014. It’s pure logic, and it’s totally in keeping with our society’s trajectory. This is no more a conspiracy theory than to say the same thing about the transgender project in 2014. So if you’re not all in with pedophilia, prepare for the smear campaign. Today “pedophobia” is defined simply as a fear of children in the same sense that acrophobia means a fear of heights. But it could easily take on a new meaning as our culture sinks ever lower. Consider this: If pedophilia is ever normalized, what are the chances that the word “pedophobia” and the term “pedophobe” will be used as slurs against people who disapprove? Against churches that disapprove? Could they be used in the same way the terms “homophobia” and “transphobia” are used as slurs today? Of course. In this scenario, if you express reservations about sexual activity between pre-pubescent children and adults, you will be publicly shamed and silenced as a “pedophobe” for doing so. A bigot. A hater. For those just waking up, we’re not in Kansas anymore. We’re on a speeding train through the Twilight Zone. And the hyper-suggestibility of most folks in this age of internet-induced mass delusion will get us there even faster. We’ve become a nation of complete squishes because all that matters to most people is how they think they’re perceived in social circles. We’ve become a nation of complete squishes because all that matters to most people is how they think they’re perceived in social circles. The fear of the smear is in high gear today, generating a pandemic of moral cowardice. It’s infecting state legislators who ought to know better. It’s infecting judges who ought to know better—and teachers, journalists, even parents. Sadly, there are many who really don’t know better and simply try to maintain the social status they think they’re afforded by political correctness. It’s up to those who do know better—those who have an active conscience—to speak up, and to stare down the smear artists in propaganda journalism, pop culture, and academia who’ve been stoking that cowardice. Too few people publicly take unpopular stances anymore, and when they do they pay a highly inflated price for it only because no one else joins them. There are too many cowards who apologize for being right, too many who self-censor out of fear of social rejection. That’s exactly the dynamic that will fast-track trends like the normalization of pedophilia. We have no choice but to stop accommodating political correctness, no matter the price. Its movement in the shadows has all the hallmarks of an impending ambush. People of goodwill must do all they can to stop the momentum of this pedophilia project in its tracks. Otherwise, it will destroy children and childhood together.

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theresourcelibrary · 6 years ago

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Yoruba Richen for TED: What the gay rights movement learned from the civil rights movement

As a member of both the African American and LGBT communities, filmmaker Yoruba Richen is fascinated with the overlaps and tensions between the gay rights and the civil rights movements. She explores how the two struggles intertwine and propel each other forward — and, in an unmissable argument, she dispels a myth about their points of conflict. A powerful reminder that we all have a stake in equality.

https://www.ted.com/talks/yoruba_richen_what_the_gay_rights_movement_learned_from_the_civil_rights_movement English transcript below the break

Election night 2008 was a night that tore me in half. It was the night that Barack Obama was elected. [One hundred and forty-three] years after the end of slavery, and [43] years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, an African-American was elected president. Many of us never thought that this was possible until the moment that it happened. And in many ways, it was the climax of the black civil rights movement in the United States.

I was in California that night, which was ground zero at the time for another movement: the marriage equality movement. Gay marriage was on the ballot in the form of Proposition 8, and as the election returns started to come in, it became clear that the right for same sex couples to marry, which had recently been granted by the California courts, was going to be taken away. So on the same night that Barack Obama won his historic presidency, the lesbian and gay community suffered one of our most painful defeats.

And then it got even worse. Pretty much immediately, African-Americans started to be blamed for the passage of Proposition 8. This was largely due to an incorrect poll that said that blacks had voted for the measure by something like 70 percent. This turned out not to be true, but this idea of pervasive black homophobia set in, and was grabbed on by the media. I couldn't tear myself away from the coverage. I listened to some gay commentator say that the African-American community was notoriously homophobic, and now that civil rights had been achieved for us, we wanted to take away other people's rights. There were even reports of racist epithets being thrown at some of the participants of the gay rights rallies that took place after the election. And on the other side, some African-Americans dismissed or ignored homophobia that was indeed real in our community. And others resented this comparison between gay rights and civil rights, and once again, the sinking feeling that two minority groups of which I'm both a part of were competing with each other instead of supporting each other overwhelmed and, frankly, pissed me off.

Now, I'm a documentary filmmaker, so after going through my pissed off stage and yelling at the television and radio, my next instinct was to make a movie. And what guided me in making this film was, how was this happening? How was it that the gay rights movement was being pitted against the civil rights movement? And this wasn't just an abstract question. I'm a beneficiary of both movements, so this was actually personal. But then something else happened after that election in 2008. The march towards gay equality accelerated at a pace that surprised and shocked everyone, and is still reshaping our laws and our policies, our institutions and our entire country. And so it started to become increasingly clear to me that this pitting of the two movements against each other actually didn't make sense, and that they were in fact much, much more interconnected, and that, in fact, some of the way that the gay rights movement has been able to make such incredible gains so quickly is that it's used some of the same tactics and strategies that were first laid down by the civil rights movement. Let's just look at a few of these strategies.

First off, it's really interesting to see, to actually visually see, how quick the gay rights movement has made its gains, if you look at a few of the major events on a timeline of both freedom movements.Now, there are tons of milestones in the civil rights movement, but the first one we're going to start with is the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. This was a protest campaign against Montgomery, Alabama's segregation on their public transit system, and it began when a woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person. The campaign lasted a year, and it galvanized the civil rights movement like nothing had before it. And I call this strategy the "I'm tired of your foot on my neck" strategy.

So gays and lesbians have been in society since societies began, but up until the mid-20th century, homosexual acts were still illegal in most states. So just 14 years after the Montgomery bus boycott, a group of LGBT folks took that same strategy. It's known as Stonewall, in 1969, and it's where a group of LGBT patrons fought back against police beatings at a Greenwich Village bar that sparked three days of rioting. Incidentally, black and latino LGBT folks were at the forefront of this rebellion, and it's a really interesting example of the intersection of our struggles against racism, homophobia, gender identity and police brutality. After Stonewall happened, gay liberation groups sprang up all over the country, and the modern gay rights movement as we know it took off.

So the next moment to look at on the timeline is the 1963 March on Washington. This was a seminal event in the civil rights movement and it's where African-Americans called for both civil and economic justice. And it's of course where Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech, but what's actually less known is that this march was organized by a man named Bayard Rustin. Bayard was an out gay man, and he's considered one of the most brilliant strategists of the civil rights movement. He later in his life became a fierce advocate of LGBT rights as well, and his life is testament to the intersection of the struggles. The March on Washington is one of the high points of the movement, and it's where there was a fervent belief that African-Americans too could be a part of American democracy. I call this strategy the "We are visible and many in numbers" strategy.

Some early gay activists were actually directly inspired by the march, and some had taken part. Gay pioneer Jack Nichols said, "We marched with Martin Luther King, seven of us from the Mattachine Society" -- which was an early gay rights organization — "and from that moment on, we had our own dream about a gay rights march of similar proportions." Several years later, a series of marches took place, each one gaining the momentum of the gay freedom struggle. The first one was in 1979, and the second one took place in 1987. The third one was held in 1993. Almost a million people showed up, and people were so energized and excited by what had taken place, they went back to their own communities and started their own political and social organizations, further increasing the visibility of the movement. The day of that march, October 11, was then declared National Coming Out Day, and is still celebrated all over the world. These marches set the groundwork for the historic changes that we see happening today in the United States.

And lastly, the "Loving" strategy. The name speaks for itself. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia, and invalidated all laws that prohibited interracial marriage. This is considered one of the Supreme Court's landmark civil rights cases. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Defence of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, and that made the federal government only have to recognize marriages between a man and a woman. In United States v. Windsor, a 79-year-old lesbian named Edith Windsor sued the federal government when she was forced to pay estate taxes on her deceased wife's property, something that heterosexual couples don't have to do. And as the case wound its way through the lower courts, the Loving case was repeatedly cited as precedent. When it got to the Supreme Court in 2013, the Supreme Court agreed, and DOMA was thrown out. It was incredible. But the gay marriage movement has been making gains for years now. To date, 17 stateshave passed laws allowing marriage equality. It's become the de facto battle for gay equality, and it seems like daily, laws prohibiting it are being challenged in the courts, even in places like Texas and Utah, which no one saw coming.

So a lot has changed since that night in 2008 when I felt torn in half. I did go on to make that film.It's a documentary film, and it's called "The New Black," and it looks at how the African-American community is grappling with the gay rights issue in light of the gay marriage movement and this fight over the meaning of civil rights. And I wanted to capture some of this incredible change that was happening, and as luck or politics would have it, another marriage battle started gearing up, this time in Maryland, where African-Americans make up 30 percent of the electorate. So this tension between gay rights and civil rights started to bubble up once again, and I was lucky enough to capture how some people were making the connection between the movements this time. This is a clip of Karess Taylor-Hughes and Samantha Masters, two characters in the film, as they hit the streets of Baltimore and try to convince potential voters.

(Video) Samantha Masters: That's what's up, man, this is a righteous man over here. Okay, are you registered to vote?

Man: No. Karess Taylor-Hughes: Okay. How old are you?

Man: 21. KTH: 21? You gotta get registered to vote.

We got to get you registered to vote.

Man: I ain't voting on no gay shit.

SM: Okay, why? What's up? Man: I ain't with that.

SM: That's not cool.

Man: What made you be gay? SM: So what made you be straight?

So what made you be straight? Man 2: You can't answer that question. (Laughter)

KSM: I used to not have the same rights as you, but I know that because a black man like yourself stood up for a woman like me, I know that I've got the same opportunities. So you, as a black man, have the opportunity to stand up for somebody else. Whether you're gay or not, these are your brothers and sisters out here, and they need you to represent.

Man 2: Who is you to tell somebody who they can't have sex with, who they can't be with? They ain't got that power. Nobody has that power to say, you can't marry that young lady. Who has that power? Nobody.

SM: But you know what? Our state has put the power in your hands, and so what we need you to do is vote for, you gonna vote for 6.

Man 2: I got you.

SM: Vote for 6, okay? Man 2: I got you.

KSM: All right, do y'all need community service hours? You do? All right, you can always volunteer with us to get community service hours. Y'all want to do that? We feed you. We bring you pizza.

(Laughter) (Applause)

Yoruba Richen: Thank you. What's amazing to me about that clip that we just captured as we were filming is, it really shows how Karess understands the history of the civil rights movement, but she's not restricted by it. She doesn't just limit it to black people. She sees it as a blueprint for expanding rights to gays and lesbians. Maybe because she's younger, she's like 25, she's able to do this a little bit more easily, but the fact is that Maryland voters did pass that marriage equality amendment, and in fact it was the first time that marriage equality was directly voted on and passed by the voters.African-Americans supported it at a higher level than had ever been recorded. It was a complete turnaround from that night in 2008 when Proposition 8 was passed. It was, and feels, monumental.We in the LGBT community have gone from being a pathologized and reviled and criminalized group to being seen as part of the great human quest for dignity and equality. We've gone from having to hide our sexuality in order to maintain our jobs and our families to literally getting a place at the table with the president and a shout out at his second inauguration. I just want to read what he said at that inauguration: "We the people declare today that the most evident of truths, that all of us are created equal. It is the star that guides us still, just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall."

Now we know that everything is not perfect, especially when you look at what's happening with the LGBT rights issue internationally, but it says something about how far we've come when our president puts the gay freedom struggle in the context of the other great freedom struggles of our time: the women's rights movement and the civil rights movement. His statement demonstrates not only the interconnectedness of those movements, but how each one borrowed and was inspired by the other. So just as Martin Luther King learned from and borrowed from Gandhi's tactics of civil disobedience and nonviolence, which became a bedrock of the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement saw what worked in the civil rights movement, and they used some of those same strategies and tactics to make gains at an even quicker pace.

Maybe one more other reason for the relative quick progress of the gay rights movement. Whereas a lot of us continue to still live in racially segregated spaces, LGBT folks, we are everywhere. We are in urban communities and rural communities, communities of color, immigrant communities, churches and mosques and synagogues. We are your mothers and brothers and sisters and sons. And when someone that you love or a family member comes out, it may be easier to support their quest for equality. And in fact, the gay rights movement asks us to support justice and equality from a space of love. That may be the biggest, greatest gift that the movement has given us. It calls on us to access that which is most universal and most intimate: a love of our brother and our sister and our neighbor. I just want to end with a quote by one of our greatest freedom fighters who's no longer with us, Nelson Mandela of South Africa. Nelson Mandela led South Africa after the dark and brutal days of Apartheid, and out of the ashes of that legalized racial discrimination, he led South Africa to become the first country in the world to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation within its constitution. Mandela said, "For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others."

So as these movements continue on, and as freedom struggles around the world continue on, let's remember that not only are they interconnected, but they must support and enhance each other for us to be truly victorious.

Thank you.

(Applause)

#video #TED #Yoruba Richen #gay rights movement #civil rights movement #race #activist #activities #history #personal growth #queer #transcript #subtitles

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