A Call to Action to Secure Equality Under the Law for the Gay Community

Friends and families, gay and straight, Mormon and not...I admire and applaud your passion for justice here today. Your presence here signals that our great country is not a uniform sea of discrimination, but a land with people that respect human dignity and affirm the rightful place of justice in our society.

We are all here today because we accept that our neighborhoods, our cities, our states, and our great country are not living up to their promise of liberty and justice for all. In light of a historic victory this week for the United States and the world, we stand in the shadow of discriminatory initiatives in three states, the most painful of which is Proposition 8 in California, because, as you all know, this wonderful church here before us played a role in denying fundamental rights to an entire group of law-abiding people in a state hundreds of miles away. Whether you stand here today out of hurt or you do so out of the conviction that these wrongs must be righted, have the courage to know that we WILL SECURE THESE FREEDOMS FOR ALL OUR PEOPLE.

The fight for the rights of gay Americans is more than just THE seminal social justice issue of our time: it is also one of immediate concern; of unparalleled gravity; of continued stress and strife for an entire group of people; and deserving of our urgency and talents as individuals seeking to improve as many people's lives as possible.

I believe in strong families, and safe and nurturing communities. I don't know anyone, gay or straight, that disagrees with that. People should be able to build strong families. They should be able to secure the means to provide a safe, healthy environment for their children. Communities should have the supports--in the form of excellent schools, caring leadership, and infrastructural resources--that reinforce bright futures for our youth. And no one should have the latitude to deny communities and families these tools, because doing so hits society where it hurts the most: our children.

Denying equal rights to same-sex couples and gay individuals does more than just violate my worldview. It delays the large-scale, long-term progress of our communities and, by extension, our nation and world. Fifty years from now, people may still disagree about the moral standing of homosexuality, but surely we can, and MUST, agree--now--that equality under the law must be extended to all law-abiding citizens, and that every responsible adult, gay or straight, has the right to raise children, to build strong families, to be a part of the safe and nurturing communities we all want for our kids.

So I present to you a vision:

We live in what is now, after this week's great Election, the third reddest state in the country. We live in the great state of Utah, and we are about to embark on a journey--right here--to help secure equal legal rights for same-sex couples and gay individuals. And if we succeed here...we can succeed everywhere.

We are going to reach out to local GLBT organizations and gifted volunteers in the gay and straight Utah community, and found a campaign that will unify people--gay and straight, Mormon and not--around the cause that protecting the rights of all Utahns builds stronger communities for all of us, and that even if we disagree with the lifestyle choices or sexual orientation of others, we cannot, on that basis, deny them any of the political fruits of living in the United States of America or the great state of Utah.

You might be wondering what it will take to get there.

We--and make no mistake, when I say we, I mean all of us committed to this cause, regardless of our own backgrounds--we must target apathy and prejudice in those that would seek to stop us from securing equal rights for our gay neighbors, friends, families, or strangers...but we must do so in a way that honors the same spirit of cooperation and acceptance that defines our movement for equality under the law. We must forgo the path of retribution, and instead embrace at every step of the way a stubborn understanding that to be victorious, to get our message across and get our legislative ideas in action, we need every single Utahn by our side, even the ones that misunderstand us, fear us, deplore us, or disagree with us. By organizing with a focus, with message discipline, with leadership and with the integrity to see this thing through to the very end, we will be able to sway people's hearts, and where we can't sway their hearts, than we must do everything in our power to convince their minds:

We can show our churches and church leaders that they have in their ranks highly devoted and doting parents with gay children, and that those children deserve the same privileges and protections that our straight children receive.

We can show our extended friends and families in Utah that Utahns and members of the LDS community, too, have been persecuted, simply because of their beliefs.

We can show our small business owners that they benefit from an industrious, well-educated workforce, and that securing equal rights for their gay employees brings them the stability and promotes the industriousness and innovation that pays great dividends in the workplace.

We can show our city courts that although churches play a valuable role in the spiritual integrity of our society, no church should ever promote public policy or use its influence to manipulate political outcomes, because doing so is unethical and, more importantly to the courts, against the law.

We can show our colleges and universities that when gay students feel safe in the academic community, they not only fulfill their personal academic potentials, but also stimulate the holistic and inclusive atmosphere of knowledge that makes strides in learning possible for all college students.

And in doing so, we can make advocates out of individuals and institutions that may not be emotionally invested in our rights but accept that only by affirming those rights can their interests and our society move forward.

I know I am not the only one with this dream. Join me in forming a campaign for human progress here in Utah. Let's fight together. Let's fight for the day when no one will ask you if you are gay or straight, because the answer won't make a difference in how they see you. Let's fight for the day when, if a gay son or daughter or niece or nephew or grandchild is born into your family, they will not be persecuted, and you will not have to fight for their rights, because we fought today for the day when we can cry and celebrate together as so many of us did this past Tuesday night, knowing that an important milestone in human history had passed--and that we were a part of it.

Be a part of this dream with me.

campaignforhumanprogress@gmail.com

Race and My Quest For Human Progress

Today, I rediscovered a simple truth about myself: I am at my best when I draw upon the emotions that drive me. I learned of those emotions during my college years, and grapple with them on the campaign trail as an intern in the Obama campaign.




As I've mentioned in an earlier post, I never knew what "race" was when I was growing up. This had as much to do with my parents' chronic inability to discuss and admit the importance of race to their lives, as it had to do with our socio-cultural context as Dominicans in the United States. After my years in poverty in the Dominican Republic as a toddler, and then years bouncing between poor American cities, I moved in with my father. An engineer, he was able to provide me with a middle-class upbringing, and with all the happy and unhappy consequences of growing up in our white suburbia. If his unyielding focus on academic excellence and sometimes harsh enforcement of scholastic discipline didn't shield me from the trappings of a racially unjust society, then perhaps my teachers' and mentors' relentless belief in me did. Whatever it was, it also prevented me from understanding the fundamental salience of race in America until my college years. I still have trouble qualifying it; I still don't know if it was a good thing: maybe it denied me a bitter perspective on race relations, and maybe it was just as well responsible for instilling in me my naive wistfulness for human unity and my foolish, lifelong desire for the racial integration of our society. But I do know that what followed my college epiphanies, in my socio-intellectual development and the expansion of my self-construct, is irretrievably linked to my fundamental belief that there has to be a way for humanity to solve its deepest of social problems--and the problem with itself.

I think we struggle, as a nation, with the fundamental nature of who we are as a people. As individuals we have many virtues, and there is no shortage of kindness in our aggregate nature. But in a larger sense, I believe we have a condition that is perhaps internal to humanity as a whole. As individuals that loathe themselves hit walls beyond which personal progress halts, so, too, does a society with deep intellectual fissures and self-disdain have difficulty reaching its potential. Deep down, I believe that we recognize our troubles for what they are. We know that far too many citizens go without healthcare, and that it is not always their fault. We realize that, 232 years after the nation's founding, far too few of us grow up with friends of a different race and that, save for the occasional diversity workshop in college, we seldom really experience racial integration, especially in our homes and neighborhoods. We know that it is wrong and unacceptable for so many children to grow up homeless or malnourished by either a lack of food or guidance or opportunities in their young lives. We know these to be true; they are self-evident, and I think we hate ourselves for it.

Whether it is this self-hatred that preempts a serious look at solutions to our problems, or a decentralized apathy--removed from guilt or even awareness--the result is as paralyzing to our progress as it is stunting to our growth; as deteriorating to our moral impulse for good as it is an affirmation that we are not only imperfect, but undisturbed at being so.

But I am a dreamer.

I believe that human beings are fundamentally good, if not always good at making decisions. We are inspired by greatness, if seldom called to it in our daily lives. I want to believe that we are capable of more readily recognizing the greater commonalities that bind us, than the smaller things that divide us, and I suspect that most of our divisions are less by desire than by design.

We have a problem with ourselves, but beyond the many that truly don't care to fix it, there are many others that are locked in such a struggle for survival that they never get the chance to even try. They never get the chance to fulfill their personal potential. I'm talking about the plumbers that could have been scientists if they'd had the chance to be; the lawyers that would rather have been peace corps activists had they not had social and familial pressures to "succeed" by modernity's standards; the doctors in private practice who would rather work in small towns and large cities to curb disease, but are instead trapped in Sallie Mae's debris. I'm talking about all the human beings around the planet for whose intelligence OLPC and UNICEF food drops will never do justice, because the larger sociological infrastructure is not in place to support the contributions they might otherwise make to the world.

We cheat ourselves of our best and most brilliant minds by reserving our resources for those of us who've been selected by time to be its master storyteller. But, more importantly, we deny ourselves the highest of Maslow's terraces, from which we might so collectively look in pride at what we've made for the world.

These are the sorts of things that have haunted me since my college days, since just before my transformational understanding of what it is that I believe humans are capable of, and since the moment that I realized I had a talent--imbued with passion--borne out of those emotions that I still grapple with, and of which which I am reminded of through my work for the Obama campaign.

Three years ago, I finished my college days believing that I'd found the recipe for social progress. It was a simple proposition: if all I had was a single fulcrum of change, I could devote my life to finding the ideal location for it, where would I place it? What policy; what agenda; what sociopolitical initiative would most forcefully cascade into the many other social problems we face in our cities, in our towns, in our communities and neighborhoods?

You may have your own answer, but for me, it was education.

I believed that if we could significantly redefine our attention to and our investment in the education of our world's children, then the canvass of our problems would eventually grow ever smaller, as more and more people grew up with the potential to turn their intellectual assets in the direction of solutions for humanity. Sure, new problems arise as the result of change and innovation. We now lie, for example, at the crosshairs of environmental implosion, on the heels of our technological and industrial progress as a nation. But I believe that if you build up an infrastructure; that if you plan far into the future and surround yourself with the right people and the right tools before you need them, then new problems become manageable, because you are equipped to easily invent tailored solutions to those new problems. For me, what that looks like is a highly educated, culturally and racially integrated society, based on justice and access to opportunities; where new threats are expunged and calamities are averted because the society has everything it needs to adapt to new demands.

This vision isn't a utopia. To me, it is the natural result of a world in which the people come before the objects in it, where humans are treated as our greatest assets and most valued investments. Out of that comes a stability—an adaptable, global self-efficacy—that secures higher standards of living, lower mortality rates; a greater sense of fairness, a fundamental respect of freedom, and a stronger moral fiber at more than just the individual level; a transformation of us all into super-people, because we shed our dependence on the giant few in exchange for the chance to become our very own heroes.

Perhaps my vision is too wide. But I believe that there has to be a way. I heard, once, from a collage dean, that education "functions to demystify the world and devictimize the people in it." When people understand their world and can share that understanding with each other, they are able to stand up against the abuses and injustices in their world. With knowledge no longer held by a minority, they all become equals.

I don’t know if Barack Obama has the power, or even the desire, to help realize the promise of the human story I have laid out. I do believe he wants to help make the world a less tragic place. He is my first hero: the first human being I genuinely consider above “role model”, and, regrettably, the only human being who, by the mere excellence of his existence, has called into doubt my confidence in my ability to bring change to the world. Perhaps only a biracial man can cross the divide of racial disunity that still haunts us, which is why I cried when I watched his Democratic Convention acceptance speech, myself a lone black man in a crowd of white supporters inside a Park City, Utah bar. I sometimes cry after a long, unpaid twelve-hour day at my Obama Headquarters, a day filled with people that genuinely care about this black man; this white man. They care about the future of this country just as much as he and I do, and they throw their very beings behind his dreams. Mostly, I cry because I know that as a people, we are close to turning to a new and better page of the human story. And I cry because I wonder if I—like this lovely man—will one day change the world with my ideas.

Perhaps, one day, somebody else will cry at what I have accomplished.

And, perhaps, much further on ahead in the pages of human history, no one will ever have to.

There Has To Be A Way: A Primer on Human Progress

I want to make people's lives better. As an undergraduate, I studied Neuroscience because I thought I could one day help save lives in the ER. But a few years into my college experience, and a few service trips later, I had seen enough socioeconomic injustice and learned about enough racial disparity to realize that the problems of our great country extended far beyond the margins I had grown up noticing in the white, middle class suburbiaplex of my adolescence, and in the pristine, insular community of my sprawling college campus. So every so often I wonder to myself, "What will it take to make people's lives better on a massive scale? There has to be a way."

A few weeks ago, Europe dazzled the world (and scared a few misinformed concern trolls) with the biggest and most advanced science project ever: the Large Hadron Collider. I figured this technological behemoth--what with its 17-mile circumference, 1600 magnets capable of accelerating protons to 99.99% the speed of light, and 6000 scientists from 80-something nations working together to uncover the mystery of mass--I figured this thing would be freaking expensive.

It cost less than $10 billion USD. That's less than the cost of a month in the Iraq war. Pittance.

Now, I know this stuff doesn't move headlines, but it does make me think: what is it that society values, and what costs would it incur if it decided to really push the envelope in the name of progress? I mean, there has to be a way, right?

From an old New York Times article on perspective:

For starters, $1.2 trillion [one estimate of the final cost of the war in Iraq] would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

Wow, you mean we could save millions of lives around the world; put a serious dent in the #1 and #7 leading causes of death in the U.S.; insure every American with quality healthcare; virtually eradicate poverty in U.S. cities; provide every lil' tike with a headstart on their intellectual development; and even throw in a nice do-over/fiscal prize to rebuild the honorable city of our brothers and sisters from New Orleans--all for the price of one Iraq War that was predicated on falsities (read: should never have happened to begin with), has worsened our moral standing in the world, and has arguably lowered, not heightened, our long-term safety?

I believe in the fundamental good in human beings. I respect the sanctity of life, and as such believe human beings (not necessarily zygotes, mind you) have a fundamental right to it. I believe humans have a fundamental right to have their health secured when they cannot secure it for themselves, and I'm not just talking about Americans. I believe human beings have a fundamental right to intellectual development and opportunities for self-actualization as furthered by equitable access to literacy and a just education system. I believe human beings should have a fundamental right to freedoms of choice, freedoms that improve the quality of their lives without morally infringing on their fellow human beings. And I believe--fully, irretrievably believe--that humanity will not reach its global potential until the larger sociopolitical engine works for it, and puts into place the infrastructure needed to bring about that potential. That, in a grand, expensive nutshell, is what it will take.

And to me, this is what this election is really about: Who among our candidates for this land's highest office can bridge the nowheres, and excite and motivate the masses to make the hard decisions, the sacrifices needed to make people's lives better in the long run? Who has the vision to look into the past in order to oversee and implement the progress of the future? Maybe we do need a big government guy like Senator Obama. And a big government gal like Senator Clinton.

Because I'm not happy with where we are. I want us to change. We have a real need. And I want to believe that we can achieve what large hadron colliders never could: use our minds to build the infrastructure needed to improve people's lives.

There has to be a way.