By Cherae Hunt | Asst. News Editor |
I think that activism and protesting does cause social change as long as the cause is absent of violence.
As of June 26, The LGBT community has the right to be married legally in the United States.
There have been protests for gay rights since 1924 with “the earliest gay rights organization The Society of Human rights in Chicago,” according to infoplease.com
For 89 years the LGBT community has been fighting for the same rights as any heterosexual couple.
New York City’s Stonewall Inn police raid in 1969 was probably one of the most influential gay rights protests in history.
When the mafia-owned bar that offered a safe place for gay men and lesbians to drink and dance was shut down, as part of a citywide crackdown on homosexual life, Greenwich Village erupted into several days of unrest according to an article by Everett Rosenfeld in Time magazine.
Violent police beat-downs and open mocking of authorities by protesters escalated the neighborhood protest into a full-scale rally for acceptance and equality.
Prior to the Stonewall riots, the gay-rights movement had been mostly underground; only two years later, there were organized groups in every major city in America, Rosenfeld also stated.
“The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5–4, in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex couples have the fundamental right to marry and that states cannot say that marriage is reserved for heterosexual couples” according to infoplease.com.
“Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right,” Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote.
“It makes me happy to see that now and for generations to come people can get married if they desire to,” said student Natalie Mendoza.
It’s a milestone for America, but when does a right to marry mean more than a human life.
The number of people killed by police so far in 2015: 470, according to the Guardian.
In 1992 Rodney King, a black man living in Los Angeles, was a victim of police brutality.
The L.A. riots were a result of the police brutality of King.
The likelihood that a black person killed by police, like 22-year-old Rekia Boyd (killed in Chicago), will be unarmed: Twice as likely as a white person killed by police, according to the Guardian.
I am disappointed that our legal system has caused so much death within the black community.
I think America has its priorities mixed up.
Protesting and activism aren’t the only actions to be enacted when promoting social change, especially when protest leads to riots.
“It’s sad when we all come together as people and as a community and instead of rising up against the people that hurt us the most we destroy the little we already have and it isn’t helping, it is making things worse,” said student Keith Stills.
Protesting and activism can create change for social issues, like LGBT people having to legal right to marry, but when violence is involved, like in the recent police brutality cases, nothing gets resolved and fighting for what is right seems like a waste of time.
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