Showing posts with label Equality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Equality. Show all posts

Monday, February 28, 2011

Onion: "Future U.S. History Students: 'It's Pretty Embarrassing How Long You Guys Took To Legalize Gay Marriage'"

Here is an article from The Onion I read a week or two ago, and it took me a while to post it.  It is funny as always, and more importantly, it does speaks some truth.  There will be a day where U.S. History students will wonder why the hell it took so long to legalize gay marriage, just like students today question why the hell it took so long to end slavery or give equal rights to African-Americans.  As someone who teaches an American social studies class, I can tell you that students do question these things.  My favorite passage:

Mr. Bernard, 58, told the class that he himself could remember how in the 2030s gay marriage was still a somewhat touchy subject in certain parts of the country.
"It's true," said Mr. Bernard, gesturing to a holographic projection of late-20th/early-21st-century antigay preacher Fred Phelps on the classroom's V-screen. "Most people had come around by the time I was your age, of course, but you would still read and hear things about how certain people in New Washington were trying to overturn the court's ruling. Hard to imagine anyone being that adamant about gays not marrying, but those were different times."
"In fact, I remember President Romney even gave this speech once calling gay marriage 'an issue that continues to divide many in our nation, including myself,'" Mr. Bernard continued. "Of course, that was before his openly gay son, Craig, served four terms as president a couple decades later."
 The last paragraph of the article really depresses me, mainly because I afraid it might be true:

After concluding the week's examination of the history of gay marriage rights, classroom sources in the year 2083 said they would be moving on to the topic of how their grandparents' generation was too late to do anything about global warming.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

A Video for Sunday

Since the Oscars are tonight, I wanted to find a good speech or moment from a movie for this week's clip.  This seemed like a pretty good choice.  Here is the great Charlie Chaplin way ahead of his time in The Great Dictator which parodies Adolph Hitler.  At the time of release (1940), the United States had not entered World War II yet, and was still at peace with Nazi Germany.  Chaplin knew what Hitler and Fascism were really about, and made this movie at a time when the rest of the world outside of Europe was only starting to realize what evil he stood for.  The speech is quite inspirational, and I feel its words are still appropriate in today's world.