13 quotes
Many Americans share the feeling that our society has forgotten how to mind its own business.
Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)
The fact is that most gay men and women lead, or try to lead, ordinary lives indistinguishable from those of their neighbours.
Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)
AIDS has had the effect of forcing gay men to examine their sexual expression.
Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)
This struggle is not about sex. It is about privacy, individuality, and civil equality and the right of all Americans, not just gay and lesbian Americans, to be free.
Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)
What gays and lesbians have to teach other Americans is that morality is how you live and how you conduct yourself, not what you happen to be.
Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)
What blocks gay equality is prejudice. What fuels the movement for gay equality is the conviction that this prejudice is not constitutionally protected, but that the individual rights of homosexual Americans are.
Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)
Our culture is in large part a majority-takes-all, reward-and-punishment system of sexual preference. It expresses itself by not only marginalizing minority preferences but by obsessively associating them with immorality and perversion.
Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)
What is happening in contemporary American society is that people who prefer to be with members of their own sex no longer see this as a reason to be deprived of the rights to citizenship, family formation, and privacy.
Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)
You're in a world of hate.
Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)
It is a sorry fact that prejudice against gays, and the violence it engenders with increasing frequency, are not yet treated by the media with the same clarity that racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, or discrimination against the disabled are.
Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)
We must also again emphasize that gays and lesbians do not seek the right to be homosexual. This "right" is not one within the authority of government to give. They are fighting for the right to secure the conditions under which they may lead ordinary, civilized lives.
Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)
This argument is not about sexual practices or particular lifestyles. It hinges on whether gay and lesbian Americans are entitled to the same enjoyment as their fellow citizens of the freedom to make choices about how to live their lives without suffering discrimination in consequence.
Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)
The emergence of an openly gay and lesbian population is simply the latest stage of the evolution of individual liberty, and a reaffirmation of American tradition.
Gay men and women don't come out because it's fashionable, popular, easy, safe, mandatory, or conventional; they do it to be true to themselves.
Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)