Why should it be legal to discriminate against homosexuals? Back when I was living in Maine, the city of Portland passed the first legislation that would prevent people from discriminating against gays in matters of housing, employment, healthcare, or anything. Needless to say, this created an outrage among many people, most notably the Christian Coalition of Maine.
People argued that they should not have to hire or house someone based on their sexuality. They said that they shouldn't have to host people whose lifestyles they disagreed with. People said that homosexuals were requesting special rights.
Of course, this is insane. Homosexuals are not asking for "special rights," they are asking for equal treatment under the law. They are asking to be allowed to live wherever anyone esle can live, to be able to work at any corporation, to be able to live their lives unhindered. They are only asking for what black people asked for, forty years ago: the right to live their lives as equals with the rest of us. Nothing else.
And yet, people fail to see this. They see Gays as a huge threat, just like black people were a "huge threat" in the civil rights era. They seem to think that tolerating Gays...just letting them live their lives as they wish...will be the downfall of our society. They want to discriminate, to force them out, to be able to treat them not as equals but as animals.
This is contrary to the very idea of our Democracy, in which "all men were created equal." America should not discriminate against any U.S. Citizen for any reason. We are all equals; even the religious among us have admitted as such, because their very philosophy is that we are all equal before God.
In many states today, it is still legal for people to be fired or discriminated against because they are homosexual. This is a travesty. We cannot allow discrimination to continue. We must allow people to live their lives. The only arguments for discriminating against homosexuals are biased, "religious," or just plain nonsense.
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"In many states today, it is still legal for people to be fired or discriminated against because they are homosexual."
Exactly what states are legally allowed to discriminate against homosexuals?
I know that all of the jobs I've applied to all note that they do not discriminate or hold race, sexual orientation, religion, gender, et cetera.
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Unless I am mistaken, most states do not actually have a law explicitly preventing people from discriminating based on sexual orientation. Most companies, especially large ones or publicly owned ones, will not discriminate because it brings bad P.R. and could cause problems if they had set up operations in a state with anti-discrimination laws on the books. But it is not illegal for them to discriminate should they do so.
(if you can't see the fnords they won't eat you)