Same Sex Marriage Should Be Legal - 1358 Words

Have you ever thought about how it would feel to be discriminated against, just for whom you love? If you haven’t, that probably means you’re straight. Gays and lesbians all over the world often experience harassment, bias, fear, hate and more. And, it’s all because they love someone of the same gender.The discrimination doesn’t just occur because of a same-sex couple being seen together. What gets narrow-minded people even more riled up is the thought of a same-sex couple being allowed to get married. According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, same-sex marriage is the state of being married to a person of the same sex or gender in a relationship like that of a traditional marriage. Throughout history, there have been naysayers that oppose†¦show more content†¦During the Holocaust, gays were persecuted along with Jews because they were viewed as â€Å"weak and unable to fight for Germany and unlikely to reproduce and contribute to the Nazi want of strengthening the Aryan race† (Burns 44).As early as the 1920s, a more public fight for support began to surface. In 1924, Henry Gerber attempted to start America’s first gay association (Marcus). When that didn’t really work, people tried again in the 1960’s and the 1970’s with LGBT community movementsin cities such as NYC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and others (Burns 27-28). The LGBT community is very active today and even includes support straight members! Throughout recent history, terminology has been affected by the movement. The word gay, which originally meant â€Å"happy,† started to mean â€Å"homosexual† in the 60’s and 70’s. It was around this time when gay rights activists thought the word was better than using â€Å"homosexual† or â€Å"homophiles† (Marcus 40). But it wasn’t all rainbows and support. If you were gay in the 70’s and earlier, and you acte d couple-y with your significantother in public, you might’ve been harassed by strangers and possibly be breaking the law (Marcus 69). At that time, individuals in the medical and psychology fields claimed that being attracted to someone of the same gender was a mental illness until it was removed from the list in 1973 by the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association (Marcus 27). Whenever