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rosalarian:

veggieheather:

wertheyouth:

Infographic: Legally Married and Legally Fired, Center for American Progress

THIS THIS THIS

I’m continuously terrified that people will think LGBT rights is a finished fight as soon as marriage equality passes nationally. There’s still so much extremely important stuff to get to. Marriage is not an end goal.

Marriage is important for all sorts of reasons.

It is not the only thing we should be caring about.

I am very much a marriage equality activist, but I still care about things like trans people being able to use the right bathroom without being harassed. I care a lot about the children of same sex couples facing harassment and discrimination. There’s a whole long list of things that need to be fixed.

The end goal, to me, includes people not having to “come out” because they don’t need to go that extra step to validate themselves. It includes trans actors getting roles according to their talent instead of being told to go make porn. It includes nobody being denied access to a public bathroom.

I think a lot of marriage activists are standing too close to their own particular goal and need to take a few steps backwards and look at the big picture and the overall issues.

My workplace actually addressed this earlier this year – they’ve always had non-discrimination clauses in place for LGB people, and they expanded it to include trans people, both employees and customers. I’m in a fairly liberal part of KY, but I was still pleasantly surprised. Some of the states they operate in already have marriage equality, so they went ahead and allowed people to add their spouses to our health insurance.

My favorite part of the new policy was them explicitly saying they don’t expect everyone to agree with it – they just expect them to follow it while they’re employed by the company. It was beautiful, and cuts out any whining about not doing something because of moral objections.