This appeared on the Viewpoint page, 7A, of the Lansing State Journal on Wednesday, June 30, 1999. I was motivated to write this by the large volume of anti-gay letters to the editor printed during the month of June. The head and subhead are the paper's, but otherwise they ran this opinion piece exactly as written. They included a photo of me, much like the one on my home page. On the day this ran, I received several anonymous phone calls thanking me for writing the piece. I continued to receive comments for several weeks, all of them either supportive or at least polite. A welcome change!
I am just like you, in many ways.
I own a house in East Lansing that is a home for my family. I have worked for over ten years at Michigan State University to support my family. My spouse and I do volunteer work in community theater and in church music. We raise our kids, take care of our house, help take care of our neighborhood, and vote regularly.
I marched in last year's MSU homecoming parade, with the Alliance of Lesbian, Bi, Gay and Transgender Students. I and my children also walked behind that banner in this summer's Michigan Pride March.
So I am not like you, in some ways.
One of the ways I am not like you is that my civil rights are not fully protected in most parts of this country. In spite of my accepting all the responsibilities of good citizenship, I may be arbitrarily fired, refused service, denied housing, denied employment, denied medical care, or jailed because I am not like you in some ways.
In letters to the editor and opinion columns, I am routinely called abomination, aberrant, analholic, depraved, detestable, filth, freak, hideous, pedofile, pervert, predator, queer, sick, sinful, slut, unnatural and worthy of death. In private letters, such as the ones I will receive because I write this piece, I have been called worse. I have been spit upon, beaten up, yelled at, had things thrown at me out of car windows, and been forced off the road while riding a bicycle.
Is this what it means to have a free country, with liberty and justice for all?
It saddens me very much that so many people justify their vile behavior toward people like me by referring to the Bible. I know many wonderful people who are Christian, and who truly attempt to do what Jesus would do. But I struggle to retain my own faith in a God who is claimed to inspire so much hatred.
Civil rights exist, or should exist, to prevent a minority from gaining power through the practice of the kind of tactics that are now being used against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, and have in the past been used against a large number of people because of their religion, gender, skin color, or ethnicity.
Ours cannot be a free and a just society if any one group of people can single out any other group of people and prevent them from having basic civil rights. The absolute truth of this society is the Constitution of the United States, not the beliefs or creeds of any other organization, secular or religious.
Those who preach hatred toward me, my family, and my friends often quote the King James Version of the Bible. I prefer to quote from the history of constitutional law.
"In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful." – Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting opinion, Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896.
Lisa Lees is a resident of East Lansing.