Reclaim Your Birthright!

After raising the issue in a previous column, Ed received a number of questions about the idea that our civil rights cannot be acquired or won because they already belong to us. We are born with them. This week he further explores the origins of his belief and issues a "call to arms" to the LGBT community by encouraging readers to "Reclaim Your Birthright!"

In my last few pieces, I have written about civil rights advocacy in the LGBT community and used the Civil Rights Movement as a backdrop. I’ve talked about building alliances with other communities, supporting our allies, being proactive and focusing on successful, strategic activism. I want us to win! I want us to pile up victory after victory until there are no longer any barriers blocking access to the rights guaranteed to each and every one of us in the U.S. Constitution.

Again, we don’t have to win or create our rights. They already belong to us. Over the weekend, I was trying to figure out when I developed that perspective, because I've found that most people think differently. When laws and barriers are erected denying others access to their rights, most of them are convinced they do not have those rights at all and must somehow win or acquire them.

The thing the Suffragettes, the Civil Rights Pioneers, and early leaders of the LGBT rights movement all had in common was that they understood they weren’t fighting to create something new. They were fighting for access to rights they already had. They are all my heroes, and I owe the freedoms I currently enjoy in large part to them. Every person who fought and removed arbitrarily constructed barriers to their rights, fortified the ability of others to access those rights in the future.

I know the sacrifices that were made for me to be able to live my extraordinarily blessed life and for me to be able to speak out on issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, and equality. But as a gay man, the government currently refuses to acknowledge my right to marry my partner, and I refuse to accept that.

I refuse to accept it because I refuse to forget the injustices valiantly endure by our predecessors. My Mother, who is in her late 50s, has vivid memories of the Jim Crow South, of drinking out of water fountains and using bathrooms designated for “Colored” people. My grandparents were forced to stand in line and pay poll taxes. They then has to stand in long lines to vote. I did not have any relatives who I knew to be openly homosexual, but there were people whose names I suddenly stopped hearing, who just disappeared. I wonder if their lives were claimed by the slow response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, which was dismissed for years as a “gay disease.”

Some people have misinterpreted my posts on the Civil Rights Movement, and I am sorry that I have not been more clear. I am not excluding LGBT people from that period of activism. I do not think it belongs to African Americans. My objection is to the idea that the Civil Rights Movement was about being a victim and powerless. It wasn't. It was about getting up off your ass, stepping out of your comfort zone and demanding access to rights that already belong to you. LGBT people made incalculable contributions to the fight for civil rights in this nation. They marched, demonstrated and were arrested. They were civil rights trailblazers, and the thing they share with pioneers of the Civil Rights Movement is the view that they did not have to ask for their rights.

Another source for my views on civil rights will be capriciously dismissed as racist by some, but the veracity of his words cannot be impugned. When Malcolm X returned from Mecca, he started to question and to even recant his earlier views on race. The same way that the anti-poverty and anti-war messages Dr. King advocated late in his life have been largely overshadowed by the “I have a dream” speech, the conciliatory positions Malcolm X adopted before he was assassinated have been drowned out by his earlier, more radical statements and the perpetually misinterpreted “by any means necessary.”

In his 1964 "Ballot or the Bullet" speech, which he delivered prior to his journey to Mecca, Malcolm X further laid the ground work for my view that our rights belong to us from birth:

Civil rights, for those of us whose philosophy is black nationalism, means: "Give it to us now. Don't wait for next year. Give it to us yesterday, and that's not fast enough." I might stop right here to point out one thing. When ever you're going after something that belongs to you, anyone who's depriving you of the right to have it is a criminal. Understand that. Whenever you are going after something that is yours, you are within your legal rights to lay claim to it. And anyone who puts forth any effort to deprive you of that which is yours, is breaking the law, is a criminal. And this was pointed out by the Supreme Court decision. It outlawed segregation. Which means segregation is against the law. Which means a segregationist is breaking the law. A segregationist is a criminal. You can't label him as anything other than that. And when you demonstrate against segregation, the law is on your side. The Supreme Court is on your side.

This weekend I was also thinking about all the young gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered boys and girls struggling with their identities in small towns and oppressively religious homes all over the nation. Sure, strides have been made, and it will be much easier for some of them to admit they are homosexual. They will embrace the freedom that can only be known by coming out of the closet to find that no matter how smart they are, no matter how much they love their country, no matter how good a neighbor they are, no matter how bravely they have served their nation, they will still be chained to the closet. As a consequence of loving a person of the same gender or because their true identity is trapped in the wrong body, they will be denied access to some of their rights. We have inherited the rewards of the civil rights struggles waged by past generations-the men and women (by birth or otherwise)of all races, faiths, sexual orientations, and gender identities.

What additional freedoms will we disentangle and bequeath to future generations of LGBT people and their allies? Right now, there is a young person living in the same town where you grew up facing the same agonizing challenges you faced. That young person is being made to feel like he or she is not good enough, like they have to hide who they are, or convinced they are a deviant and an abomination. They need us to be brave. They need you to be brave. Throw out the mistaken notion that you are powerless, that you are a victim. Civil rights pioneers were triumphant, victorious, noble, and it is upon their broad, steady shoulders that we will stand and reclaim that which is ours!

If you don't take this kind of stand, your little children will grow up and look at you and think "shame."-Malcolm X

This column is dedicated to Dustin Lance Black.