Digital Voices

This I Believe
Same Sex Marriage

Caitlinn’s speech

There are two people walking down the street holding hands. They sneak a kiss and are rewarded with dirty glares and crude remarks from others. They are homosexuals. Homosexuality is when you like just the same sex, and heterosexuality is when you like only the opposite sex. There is also bisexuality where you like both males and females. It is all the same to me. You should be able to love whoever you want to.
Love is love… is it not? Whether you’re black, white, Asian, bisexual, transsexual, or heterosexual, the affection stays the same. Love doesn’t become wrong and tainted just because you’re a man who adores another man or a woman who adores another woman. Carl Jung a famous Swiss psychiatrist says, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” Love can transform you, if you care about a person with all of your heart you can transform for them. Does it really matter if you’re a hetero or a homosexual couple?
Whether you’re in a relationship with a male, female or both, it doesn’t mean you’re this nasty person that when someone touched you they become gay too. Homosexuality is not a disease. You can’t contract it. James Baldwin a famous black author who is also homosexual says, “Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.” I completely agree. We do not have some fatal disease. We are Americans and we have the same feelings so why should laws restrict our freedom to marry whomever we want? The only state that will allow same sex marriage is Massachusetts. It’s legal in The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, and South Africa also. Other states that will allow you to get a civil union or domestic partnership, which is like marriage but without the marriage certificate, are New Jersey, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Vermont, and just recently California. These are the only states that will acknowledge the fact gay people may want to get married too.
Since these states are the only ones that allow you to obtain anything close to a marriage certificate it’s really not that important because even if you get married or obtain a civil union or domestic partnership you are still not able to leave your estate or money to your spouse in your will, claim social security, get a joint income tax return like married hetero couples because of the laws against same sex marriage. We are denied so many of our rights because we dare to say, “Hey, I’m different and I’m happy with that!” Everyone knows it exists and most people are okay with it. Almost everybody at one point in their lives will know, met, or make friends with a homosexual person.
The people of this world are fascinated with homosexuals and there are several movies and t.v. series across the world featuring gay and lesbian couples. The most famous movie would be Brokeback Mountain starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal that came out in 2005. Another movie is Prom Queen which came out in 2003 in Canada. A t.v. series in the United Kingdom about gays is Queer as Folk. A movie with a lesbian couple in it would be The Jane Austen Book Club based on the novel by Karen Joy Fowler in 2007. All across the world homosexuality is considered an issue when really it isn’t. Everybody’s curiosity about gays and lesbians and will always be there. We may have some minor differences as in I’m blonde and your brunette but other than that we are exactly the same. So why is it so easy to classify being homosexual as being different. If homosexuality was what we considered to be right and heterosexuality was what we thought of as different… how would you feel to be the one at the butt of everyone’s jokes and taunts? Just think about that before you decide to make fun of someone for being homosexual or bisexual.

Podcasting is when you post an audio file on the internet of yourself saying a speech, an essay, or just plain saying something. I listened to the essay Returning to What’s Natural by Amelia Baxter-Stoltzfus. I chose this piece because I thought it sounded interesting and a fun topic. The fact that she took something like temporary hair dye and could compare it to changing yourself stood out to me. She said that when we change our hair color we still have that plain old boring brown to come back to after 20 to 26 washes. That to me is like saying we can change the way we act and the friends we surround ourselves with but we’ll always those friends we’ve had since grade school or those comic books we’ve collected since we could read. No matter how much we change ourselves we always have the old to fall back on. The message was so clear and so well spoken that it was effective. I understand what she was trying to say. The introduction caught my attention because she said, “I believe in semi-permanent hair dye.” That’s not something you hear someone say everyday, and I’m proud to say I believe in it too.