How backwards is this?
Monday’s Supreme Court ruling, extending full Civil Rights Act protections to LGBT people, was a great moment for humanity. It’s a reminder of how years and decades of hard fought activism can finally result in sudden and unexpected progress. It’s also a reminder that progress, even when it comes, rarely happens in a straight line.
Take Pete Buttigieg as an example. Four months ago, he narrowly won the Iowa caucus. His candidacy faded after that, but for a minute there, he was a contender to become President of the United States. But not until yesterday did Pete Buttigieg have a full set of civil rights. If he had hypothetically taken a job waiting tables after he dropped out of the race, he could have then been fired from that job prior to today, simply for being gay – even after he had won the Iowa caucus.
And yet even with this Supreme Court ruling, the Trump regime has made moves over the past few days to try to take away basic LGBT medical patient rights – during a pandemic no less. It’s a reminder that while the cycle of progress always moves forward in the long term, it always plays out in uneven, frustrating, too-slow, and sometimes backwards fashion. All we can do is to simply keep pushing forward.
