Sunday, January 11, 2015

Panti Bliss on the Price LGBT People Pay Daily Due to Discrimination



Irish drag queen Panti Bliss keeps on educating. Here she is, in a video just uploaded to You Tube, addressing a group at a Tedx event in Dublin last September, saying:

You get fed up of people using their time and energy and talent to campaign against you being treated like every other citizen.  . . .  I am 45 years old and I am fed up putting up so I'm not any more. I'm 45 years old and I'm not putting up any more because I don't have the energy any more. Putting up is exhausting. I'm 45 years old and I'm not putting up any more because I don't have the patience any more. 45 years old: I was  born 6 months before the Stonewall Riots and you have had 45 years to work out that despite appeareances I am just as ordinary, just as unremarkable, and just as human as you are. I am 45 years old and I am not asking any more. I am just being, human being.

As someone who lives in a Catholic diocese whose chief shepherd, Bishop Anthony Taylor of Little Rock, is actively campaigning against my being treated like every other citizen, using what Frank Bruni today rightly calls the "dog whistle" of "religious liberty" to cloak ugly discriminatory prejudice in religious wraps, I hope Ms. Bliss keeps on keeping on. Keeps on educating.

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