When I was a kid growing up, I was illegal in 37 states. Not my actions. My self. My being.
There were jobs I couldn’t take; professions that were off-limits to me; security clearances that I wasn’t eligible for. Because *I* was illegal. Not my actions. My self.
And that has changed in the past 50 years or so.
That has changed dramatically.
Thank the lord for the queers at Stonewall and the riots that they inspired.
But the undercurrents of society that hates queers has never gone away, and never will.
And *my* rights — not even who I get to love or marry or have sex with — to shop and buy groceries and gas and pizza and flowers, to be seen at a hospital, to work, to be WHO I AM: those are up to people in the general populace to vote on. People who can be whipped into a frenzy of hate whenever some right-wing yahoo wants people to look-over-there.
I am legal at their mercy.
Every right that I have is at their mercy.
My marriage and my family are at their mercy.
Everything that most people take for granted.
It can be gone, like the wind, like a whisper, if not enough blue voters show up at the polls.
My wife and I have been married for 23 years. And 10. And 7. To varying degrees, and with varying levels of equality with our neighbors and siblings. But we were lucky to have any rights at all. And everything we have is because we happened to live in a blue city in a blue county in a blue state.
But, as we saw yesterday, that can change on a dime.
And what happens when _you_ aren’t legal anymore?
And why should someone’s fundamental rights be up to a popular vote?
Whose families will get destroyed when there’s a patchwork of laws that affect your family, your children, as you drive across the country? If your kids are yours in Illinois, but mysteriously cease to be yours when you cross into Indiana, and the kids want to go to Warren Dunes? What if, God forbid, someone falls and hurts themselves? What if the only hospitals around are Catholic-affiliated hospitals in areas where the Catholic-affiliated hospitals hate queers and their families?
Will some weird stranger on the street file child abuse charges against you because they saw Momma kissing Mommy, or Papa kissing Daddy? I mean, win or lose, that’s a whole lot of anguish, and time in court, and money out of your pocket, because some asshole decided that their outrage at who you are is more important than you being able to be there for your kids?
When will red America realize that it can vote away the rights of *other people* whom they hate who aren’t protected by 5 members of the Supreme Court? What happens when those 5 members say that the Blacks and the Jews and the Muslims and the immigrants aren’t protected by the Constitution? What protects you when the community won’t? What if you happen to be handicapped, or elderly, or infirmed? What, in the Constitution, protects the college educated, the Union worker, the homeless? Nothing.
What rights can be taken away before someone says “that’s it; that’s the floor; you can’t make things any worse for these people”?
Is there a floor?
There has to be some kind of list of fundamental rights that are not up to the largesse of the community at large. I mean, otherwise, what’s the point?
But, that is never going to happen. We’re never going to get them, if people like Joe Manchin — or Pat Robertson — get to decide who has the fundamental right to exist, and who doesn’t.