Occasionally I wear a tee shirt with that saying. I really believe it. One reason that public opinion has swung in favor of gay rights, including gay marriage, is because gays came out of the closet. Fifty years ago, almost no one knew any gay people. It isn’t that there weren’t gay people around, but they were in hiding. A major result of the gay rights movement was that gays publicly proclaimed who they were. Sometimes their voices shook, but they spoke out.
Straight people discovered they knew gays. They were friends, siblings, colleagues, and neighbors. It is difficult to be anti-gay if your brother is gay. I’m reasonably certain Santorum would knock off the gay bashing if he knew his sister-in-law was a lesbian, or if one of his sons confided that he was gay.
It is for this reason that women who have had an abortion or men who are husbands or partners of women who had an abortion should speak out. When is the last time at a public meeting you heard a woman announce that she had an abortion? Literally millions of American women have had abortions, yet they are silent in the national debate. I believe many of the anti-abortion fanatics would be quite surprised to learn that their sisters or friends or even their mothers at one time had an abortion. I am fully and personally aware that getting an abortion is not an easy decision. Nonetheless, we need to speak out, shaky voice or not.
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