Wednesday Rants: An Ignorant Phrase

I love being able to write about whatever happends to be on my mind. I enjoy being able to fluctuate from (my attempts at) wittiness to seriousness on a whim. However, as you can all attest, I struggle with writing regularly. So I thought I would try adding a little structure to my blog (we all love rules, don't we Mr. Gray?). Plus, a lot of things bug me... Thus "Wednesday Rants" was born. Why 'wednesday' you ask? Mainly because there's nothing good on TV Wednesday nights, and it's the hardest day of the week to spell and I like to challenge myself. Now stop asking questions and read on.

Wednesday Rants- "The Gays":

I recently read an article entitled 'Why The Gays Hate Their Bodies'. This was shared on Facebook by a friend (as is most of the news I read), so of course I saw only the title of the article first. I immediately had an offensive reaction to the term "The Gays".

I hate that term. It annoys me that in this day and age, after all the hard work and struggles we've overcome in the name of civil rights, that we can still say things that sound so ignorant. To me, the phrase "the gays" is implicating gay people are so fundamentally different from other humans in our society that they require their own classification. It indicates that they are merely a subset of our society rather than part of our society. It is just another way to alienate people; to seperate "us" from "them". It's really no different than "the blacks" or the ever dreaded "you people", both of which have become essentially unacceptable in our society. There's also the issue of when you generalize a whole group of people, you are gauranteed to be wrong in at least one instance.

One of the biggest flaws that we face as a country today is the race to alienate each other; to create an "us" vs. "them" mentality. We especially see this in politics (even when it's not an election year), in religion, and even in socio-economic classes. Somehow we started making our differences into dividers. We should, instead, be appreciating the differences we see in one another, and using the unique perspectives we each hold to make a better place for everyone.

Now I do have to say, I did read the article in its entirety. It was written by a gay man, and I believe he was using that particular phrase to make a point. It is still important to remember, though, that LGBT people aren't just gay/bi/transgendered. They are our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, parents, employees. If you must address the community as a whole, how about saying "gay people". At least that attests to their humanity.