“Gay is the new Black” ?

This first decade of the 21 century has been full of surprises, good ones and bad ones. . I have been witness to a number of events that I did not expect to see, in my life time. Just the realization, that we still have two more years to go in this decade, makes me shudder and wonder, “What’s next?” There are actually ten events that I did not expect to see, in my lifetime. But I’ll just discuss four of those events here.

First, is the 9/11/01 Terrorist Attack on the United States. To this day, seven years later, I find it incredible that this actually happened. These terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jets and successfully flew two of them in to the World Trade Center buildings in New York and flew a third jet in to the Pentagon. The Pentagon is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense. They managed to pull this off before anybody knew what was going on. Just think how much worse things would have been if they had a nuclear bomb and/or a biological weapon on those jets. I never thought that I would ever see anything like that happen in the United States.

As I was growing up and became aware of local and national events, I came to realize that when you hear about certain kinds of crimes being committed on the news, you just knew that it was a white person that committed that crime. After 2002, we no longer continued to look at things in this way. John Mohammed and Lee Malvo became the first Black snipers and were responsible for the deaths of ten people.
It was amazing to see the somewhat unknown Sen. Barack Obama come out of nowhere and win the Democratic Party’s nomination for President in 2008. Sen. Barack Obama went on to crush Republican John McCain in the 2008 Presidential Election, winning with 53% of the popular vote and a wide Electoral College margin. I never thought that I would live to see a black candidate win the nomination, let alone win the Presidential Election.

Since Sen. Barack Obama has been elected as President of the United States, I have begun to see the phrase “Gay is the new Black” in a number of news articles. Let me explain this to you. Many people have the mindset that, 'now that America has voted a Black man in to the Office of the President, Black people are seen as normal. But gays are not seen as normal.' The way that they see it, how can any of us play the ‘race card’, now that the President is a Black man? So what group of people in America is feeling that they are the most mistreated? Gays. This is really all about the movement to ban gay marriage in various states. Opponents of gay marriage do not see this as a civil rights issue. Civil rights are about who you are, not what you do. So as long as being gay is seen as something that we ‘choose to do’ and not who we are, this issue will be a long virtual tug of war.