No Civil Rights Gains Without Pain

But despite these positive trends, we still have some work to do and dark days to come. We have the undivided attention of the Religious Reich. They will use every dirty trick, falsehood and lie to prevent the inevitable from happening just as they tried to do during the 60's Civil Rights Movement and failed.

We will lose more transgender people to violence. The Remembering Our Dead list will get longer. The anti-transgender rhetoric coming from their acolytes will get nastier and more hateful. They will try to spin and twist Bible verses to favor their immoral positions. But in the end the result will still be the same and the neo-fascists will lose.   Monica Roberts    June 14, 2007   'We're Winning'

Can I call it or what?

Mike Huckabee was vilified for saying it a few months ago, but it's basically the thinking of the people who oppose GLBT rights.  They have the belief that the LGBT community 'hasn't suffered enough' to warrant having its constitutional civil rights coverage granted to them.

Yeah, it's BS, but that's the mentality undergirding the wallowing in privilege social conservafool opposition. 


I know the TBLG community is distressed over the suicides of our younglings over the past week in addition to other issues concerning our stalled civil rights agenda.   But as I said three years ago, it was only a matter of time before the Forces of Intolerance pushed back hard against our civil rights advances as they have historically done against any advances of marginalized groups in American society.

We aren't any different.

As Dr. W. E. B.DuBois reminds us, 'political power is the beginning of all permanent reform and the only hope for maintaining gains.'    The Forces of Intolerance know that as well, which is why they engage in the tactics of delay, opposition, and divide and conquer by using community sellouts to do their dirty work.

If that doesn't work, then the violent opposition and intimidation get rolled out by the Forces of Intolerance to slow down the momentum for change..

We've had a rough week in terms of several LGBT kids killing themselves across the country and the increased bullying aimed at others.  Around the world transpeople are being killed or assaulted just for being who they are.   We've even had transpeople assaulted Thursday in Malmo, Sweden who were there for the start of a European trans conference.

But far from retreating back into the closet and giving up, which is what our opponents would like us to do, we need to summon the intestinal fortitude, courage and strength to fight even harder for the societal change that needs to happen.

No marginalized group ever won their freedom from cowering in submission to the people who oppressed them.  The BTLG community isn't any different.  

So yes, there's going to be lots of pain experienced before we see civil rights gains.   Some of it will be physical.  Many more people are going to die or be injured because we are who we are.  We can bet on having more TDOR ceremonies in this decade.


Much of our pain will be emotional.  We'll be frustrated at the pace of our social justice agenda.   There will be fantastic gains, glacial progress and rollbacks.   We'll even snap at each other as we struggle to determine what is the best pathway forward for our movement.

But when we finally do get to where we need to go civil rights wise, the win will be so much sweeter when it's achieved.