The Red State-Blue State Divide Is Growing For LGBT People

http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2017/3/15/red-state-blue-state-divide-growing-lgbt-people

The Advocate
By: Amanda Kerri
March 15, 2017

While everyone was hashtagging that they were standing with Gavin, South Dakota passed a law that will allow religiously affiliated adoption agencies to refuse to work with same-sex couples and still receive state funding. This was largely overlooked in the face of what was a major news event, with the Supreme Court deciding not to hear Gavin Grimm's case. Yet what is overlooked in Gavin's case as well as the South Dakota law and most other major news events that affect LGBT people is that they aren't happening in New York, California, or Washington State; they're happening in all those deep red states. The ones that no one seems to notice until there's something to complain about or it's a major athletic event like the Final Four or the college bowl games. Sometimes, it doesn't get noticed at all, like when the LGBT community center in Tulsa, Okla., was vandalized last week. It must have gotten lost in the fog of the gay Beauty and the Beast character.

It is sad that there was not more attention given to the adoption law in South Dakota. There are so many things going on at one to protest and resist, that i think people are just out of energy to focus on more than a few or a category.

There is a huge divide at the state government level in particular between blue and red, and the influence of fundamentalist religion in those states is far, far greater. Still, there are progressive and affirming communities in almost all of those places and they need encouragement.

What needs to be done is to stop exemptions for religious belief.  Religion is a delusion and it has no place in laws.  In fact, by allowing things such as this, they are interfering with my right to be free of religious beliefs.

To quote one of our Founding Fathers:

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."
~Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Horatio Spofford, 1814
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Conform and be dull. —James Frank Dobie, The Voice of the Coyote