Women, black people, and disabled people. Now it seems that it’s gay people’s turn to get their civil rights recognized. Twenty, thirty years from now people will be wondering why it took us neanderthals so long. The views that we express today will be rationalized as being from a different, less enlightened time. I, for one, am glad that I’ve never thought that gay people didn’t deserve what everyone else has. No embarrassment for me!
So when gay people get to marry and sexual preference becomes a protected class for discrimination, will that be the end of America’s civil rights battles? Who are we trampling today that will be marching in the streets tomorrow? I need to know so I can become enlightened.
How can we know? Isn’t the point that, thirty years ago, no one would have predicted gay rights? Transgendered people seem to be high on the list (“Which bathroom do they use?”) Protection of rights for the Great Apes seems to be up and coming: I think we’ll live to see an end to medical experiments on chimps. (But PETA notwithstanding, I figure we’ll still be eating meat for the next thirty years.)
I want to live long enough for robot rights to be a leading issue!
Hmmmmm had to think about that, and the best I could come up with is the “right” of ugly/ disabled/ severly inhibited/ whatever people to have sex, which would mandate the right to use prostitutes, currently banned in much of the western world, excepting one state in the US, part of Australia and all of New Zealand ( to my knowledge- I stand ready to be corrected ).
I kind of agree with Trinopus that trans rights will be the next thing on the list; I’ve seen enough in the news about it already.
Afterwards, though, one of the upcoming rights pushes in North America, I think, will be to legalize marriages with more than two people. This will be much more difficult that legalizing same-sex marriage, though; not just because there are fewer people interested in promoting it, but because it will require larger changes.
Two-person same-sex marriage fit neatly into the two-person different-sex marriage structure; in Ontario many changes were as simple as changing the marriage-license form to say something like “applicant” and “joint applicant” rather than “husband” and “wife”.
However, marriages with more than two people may well require new family-law structures to be created. For example, if person A marries person B and person C, is C married to B in any sense? If A dies, do B and C have any mutual obligations? These and a thousand other questions about property and visitation rights and inheritances and all sorts of things need to be handled. (I’m sure there have been threads about this here…)
Beyond that, I think in the long term, over the next century or so, there will be a renewed look at the nature of competency and consent.
Right now we draw hard boundaries in various places to define “consenting adults”. What if the definition of “adults” changes? (Adults being people who have the power and self-awareness to make decisions for themselves and consent to things…) What if the definition changes to include more people, or even non-human entities? Can an animal give consent or sign a contract? A self-aware robot? A child? What if the definition changes to remove competency from some people who now have it, such as people with certain medical conditions?
I think the point is that 30 years ago discriminating against gay people was widely considered acceptable, not that no one at that point would have predicted gay rights. There had been a gay rights movement in the US for years by 1983.
I agree that transgender rights are likely to become a more prominent issue in the near future. Autism rights may become a major issue. There may also be an equal rights movement for types people who don’t even exist now – clones, the genetically modified, etc.
(most enlightened will say: “Any sane, rational person has the right to choose death”).
The law says: anyone considering suicide is mentally deficient and must be physically restrained to prevent that choice.
For many, life is miserable; it is only the thought that they can check out at will whifch makes it tolerable.
For those who have seen the TV show “MASH” but not the movie (in the movie, the song is sung), the words to that little tune on the intro are “and I can take or leave it if I please”. The title is “Suicide is Painless”.
I still see and hear an uncomfortable amount of social stigma attached to being obese; also elderly.
But I don’t predict those groups as next. Nor am I sure they should be next at least relevant to the order or degree of discrimination.
Apparently we have to take turns at these things. Remember half of the population didn’t get the right to vote until some decades after Black males had the right.
Seems to be a sad fact of American politics that we can’t manage to come up with some all-purpose rights that would apply across the board to all of its citizens. Because the way we’ve traditionally gone about it is crazy divisive.
usedtobe, good one. We are going to be top heavy with elderly and ill people in the near future and modern medicine just keeps coming up with methods to prolong life in ways that don’t seem very satisfactory to me.
Many of the people in my generation that I talk to say they have no interest in ending their lives lying in bed in a nursing home. I think a definite change in attitude is appearing.
That’s a good suggestion.
Gotta say though, that for younger people with depression, I hope that society’s/government’s response to their desire to die will come up with an increased understanding of the environmental and social causes of depression and have better ways to address those. That’s in addition to finding better medical methods. And being willing to finance them.
Maybe Native Americans? Until very recently the women on reservations weren’t protected by domestic violence laws. And some tribes have slowly been trying to buy back some of their sacred land. Could be change in the air.
You know, of course, this whole liberation business got rolling in 1762 when someone wrote a book with the first sentence* “Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.”*
It’s not a matter of who’s the most deserving of liberation next: it’s those whose chains are are the most rusted-through. IMHO, its going to be some group that was safe to treat like shit because they didnt have money, but now finally have enough to tip the dynamic.
There were people starting to talk about it more than 30 years ago. I even remember a movie with Ryan O’Neal and John Hurt about a cop (O’Neal) who had to investigate murders in the gay community and had to partner up with a gay cop (Hurt) and go undercover. One of the themes of the movie was that gay people should be treated just as people and not as something different and strange. O’Neal starts out as the tough guy cop who doesn’t like gays but grows to accept them after being forced to spend time with them.
Looking it up on IMDB the movie was called Partners and it came out in 1982. Not exactly the most memorable movie ever but it was 31 years ago.
Neanderthals, obviously. It’s not like we’re drowning in records, but I’m willing to bet they’d be pretty pissed off at the way we use the term as an insult.