Reflecting on last week's Democratic convention
By Dana Beyer on September 11, 2012
http://www.washingtonblade.com/2012/09/11/reflecting-on-last-weeks-democratic-convention/ My Jewish heritage holds one critical principle at its core, as enunciated by Rabbi Hillel 2000 years ago: "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Christianity does the same with a similar admonition from Jesus, from the same time period. Over the past 50 years in the United States, that core belief held by so many Americans was tested, both during the African-American and LGBT civil rights movements, in a surprising and powerful way.
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Our drive for LGBT freedom and equality has been driven by those who came out of the closet and spoke for themselves. We have succeeded over the past 40 years, because we have embraced that power. After depending on the sympathies of those in power for so long, we now have some political power of our own. Even the trans community, shoved aside after Stonewall and late again to the party until the past decade, has seen a wondrously accelerating rush to freedom and acceptance that was unimaginable just four years ago. Having just returned from serving as a national committee member at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, where the halls of the arena were so overwhelmingly gay, where trans persons seemed to continually come out of the woodwork, and where the party is now fully committed to LGBT rights as if none of it was ever in question, I am left with a profound realization.
