I write this to you all with the strongest of emotions from the bottom of my heart. I'm not trying to be sensationalist, I'm writing it because the recent flurry of anti-LGBT rights that has sprung up across parts of the globe with the utmost urgency and impassioned hatred, the likes of which I've never consciously encountered in my 33 years of life, is beyond disturbing.
This is by no means the most important thing in the world right now; people are dying in wasteful battles across the Middle East for instance. In this country our own government has just stomped on the wellbeing and livelihood of thousands of disabled people. But as strongly as I feel about those issues, this one affects me directly, the average gay person getting on with his life.
I know and will defend to my last breath that I'm a good person. I work full time in a job that I enjoy and that I'm good at. I have two cats, a nice home in a working class area that I grew up in, a wonderful family and fantastic friends. But it's the average person's voice that needs to be raised right now. I'm not a fervent campaigner belonging to any particular group, and of course they too are made up of lots and lots of everyday people as well, but the spokespeople who we often rely on to fight these fights for the rest of us tend to become celebrities to their cause whether they like it or not and whether or not its positive or negative.
I should say; I'm not appointing myself the voice of all. People have the right to have a different opinion from mine but I bet your bottom dollar there are plenty of people that agree with me too.
On what you might ask? Well, honestly, on the absolute pity I feel for you all. I don't hate you (back), I don't wish bad things on you, and I don't plot and scheme with evildoings in mind. I genuinely pity the existence that you've chosen for yourselves. And unlike the fiction you spread about my sexuality, it is a life you've chosen for yourself, yet based on nothing more than a good brainwashing maybe from the generation before you or your peers perhaps when you were younger, you make up lies about how I came to be a gay man, and make suppositions on how I live my life simply because I'm a gay man. I was born this way, no one will tell me otherwise. Yet you have the audacity as a person who is no better than I, to say that I am likely to be a paedophile, or that I corrupt young people in general and that my very existence will cause the downfall of society. Many of you hold this belief when you argue that I shouldn't be allowed to 'Marry' another man.
You use tools in your unfounded arguments such as the bible. A piece of work that even for people who have different beliefs or no spiritual beliefs, is recognised to have steered the course of human history. Opinions of the bible aside, you misquote it constantly. You are zealous in your beliefs and constantly contradict yourself. And even if every passage in the bible did call for the suppression of gay people, I'd still say all of this. But it doesn't.
You won't be reasoned with, or consider what evidence is available - carried out through legitimate, unbiased research. You certainly pay no heed to the millions of gay people that would line up and tell you how wrong you are.
I can therefore only believe that most of you live a life filled with directed hate. Your small minded view of this wonderful world that we live in is so tainted that you're missing the best bits about being human. Some of the most wonderful things in this world are just waiting there to be experienced and to make what can be such difficult lives for many people, all the better. You miss out on the full rainbow of human emotions and in fully connecting with the positive side to your humanity. You're spending a very short existence in a society that will likely go on for tens of thousands of years after you've gone, by preaching hatred, intolerance & inequality.
Regardless of where you think life came from; it's certainly a gift. You're wasting it. You will reach the end of your lives having been consumed by hatred and negativity and very likely full of regret that both your toxic plans never really came to fruition and you may even realise that you wasted your precious years on earth. Regardless of all the bad, I believe that humanity's best aspects will win out, and we will hopefully grow and develop as a species, but not while you hold us back.
So, Please don't tell me, another human being, whom I have the right to love and marry, when you must barely understand what love really is.