Now
wait, heterosexual agenda? Wasn't it the homosexual agenda?
At least, thats
what the religious (un)right would like us to believe. But if we
examine our culture there's overwhelming and persuasive pressure
to be heterosexual. From birth were saturated with heterosexism,
usually beginning with our parents.
In the media
couples are almost always portrayed as male and female, though gays
and lesbians are receiving increasingly more exposure from cable's
The L-Word, to public TV's In
the Life to networks Buffy
the Vampire Slayer.
Sex researcher
Alfred Kinsey developed a scale measuring sexual orientation,
now known as theKinsey
Scale that ranges from 0 to 6, where 0 is exclusively heterosexual
and 6 is exclusively homosexual. A rating of 7 - for asexual - was
added later by Kinsey's associates.
Gender is also
a spectrum. A mistake is to equate sex with genderthey're
separate and distinct. Sex is male and female, or a blending of
the two in intersexed people.
Gender is a social construct that places men and women into distinct
categories each with its own attributes such as dress, hair style,
mannerisms, walk, etc. The West tends to have strict gender constructs
and sometimes ridicules, or acts negatively toward, gender-variant
folks.
Some in the
religious right think transgendered people are trying to 'deconstruct'
biological gender. We have better things to do than try to get boys
to wear dresses and want to live our lives without transphobia and
homophobia.
No matter how
one feels about same-sex marriage, denying one class of people the
same rights granted to another is in violation of the 14th
Amendments equal protection of the laws.
When I hear
Christians spouting off about the homosexual agenda, this
is much ado about nothing. The heterosexual agenda is more persuasive
and powerful, along with the religious right's anti-GLBT
agenda.