Any LGBTQ People in Jefferson County?
Silly question, right? Of course there are. You might even know one or two. But you may not know just how many there are exactly and we definitely don’t know how many fall within each of the letters. In fact, since LGBTQ represents two different dimensions: sexual orientation and gender identification, a single individual could fall into two categories. It’s a complicated demographic.
And another point: we don’t know where in the county they live. Some might be your neighbors, but you might not even know. There is some evidence, though, that a lot of them live in one of the five main municipalities in the county: Harpers Ferry, Boliver, Charles Town, Ranson, and Shepherdstown. There’s evidence for sizable LGBTQ populations in at least four of these towns (Ranson being the exception). These four communities within the past ten years have passed non-discrimination ordinances that explicitly include their LGBTQ citizens. Legislation like this can only come about if there is a community push to make it happen. That push typically starts with LGBTQ people themselves.
But LGBTQ people don’t all live inside the boundaries of these towns. They’re likely scattered everywhere else around the county, though not in numbers enough to influence the passage of a county wide non-discrimination ordinance. That’s not likely to happen anytime soon, since Republicans for now control the county government and they aren’t exactly on board with supporting gay rights. In fact it’s much the opposite. Republicans are becoming openly antagonistic, especially toward transexual people, the T’s of the acronym.
Trans people might be their current target, but there is discussion in certain Republican circles of taking back the gains that LGBTQ people have made in legislation, the courts, and in Americans’ attitudes. Some Republicans, for example, have been openly sharpening their knives to refight the battle that legalized gay marriage. In their minds gay and lesbian people are not deserving of the right to stable, loving relationships.
They’re starting off slow by banning books dealing with LGBTQ issues and lifestyles and purging mention of the contributions that these people have made to creating an affirming society. Republicans don’t expect gay and Lesbian people to be decent, caring, and patriotic. So mention of historically significant LGBTQ people is being scrubbed from Republican controlled websites, monuments, and school curricula.
So like much of muddled and shortsighted Republican thinking, there is not much thought given to what America will become if and when it rescinds gay rights. We can get some idea that it won’t be pretty, given what’s happening with the Republicans’ successful attack on abortion rights. We’ve got women being harmed and even dying when they’re denied medical care to terminate a pregnancy gone wrong.
With LGBTQ people we already know from past histories how America has regarded them. In the bad old days, bad old practices led to high rates of social stigma and isolation, self-harming, and suicide. It’s all understandable. When you shit all over powerless people they don’t react well to it.
But there are also negative effects on the wider society. When people become antagonistic to a large segment of their population, it creates tensions that erupt into violence. Here I don’t mean it will be LGBTQ people who commit that violence. It will be violence committed on them. Discrimination makes bullies. Don’t look any further than what Black Americans have put up with, and still do, from their haters.
LGBTQ people are Americans. They were born here and fall under the “all men are created equal” statement in the Declaration of Independence. But there is a lot of negatives thrown at them. The argument that they want to recruit kids to their lifestyle is wrong. They know that being LGBTQ is something they are endowed with, not something they acquired. The argument that they are cultural misfits and need to be suppressed is wrong. They are contributors to making America a force that shapes world culture. The argument that they violate moral standards is wrong. That argument is simply evidence that religions can be intolerant.
Democrats believe that there is strength in diversity. Even if it were possible to homogenize the population into just straight men and women, it wouldn’t necessarily be a desirable outcome. Diversity leads to new ideas, new ways of thinking, new actions that meet new challenges. Diversity cooked into the evolutionary process is what made us adaptable and as successful as we are as a species. You don’t want to lose diversity. You want to protect it.
