Unlike people of my generation, my children and my grandchildren have grown up living with, knowing, people who were outwardly gay and lesbian. And they have learned that they're just like us... And when you see that they're just like us, the rationale for discrimination melts away.
Interpretation
David Boies highlights the importance of exposure to diversity in dismantling discrimination.
In this quote, David Boies reflects on how his children and grandchildren's understanding of LGBTQ+ individuals transforms their perception of them, recognizing that they share the same humanity. This familiarity challenges and ultimately diminishes the rationale for discrimination, suggesting that knowledge and acceptance are critical in fostering a more inclusive society.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about LGBTQ+ rights can highlight the importance of visibility and acceptance.
One of the things that the court held in Brown v. Board of Education is that government can't impose a badge of inferiority on some of its citizens. Yet that is exactly what Proposition 8 does with respect to gay and lesbian couples in California.
It's terribly important that we extend the promise of equality that the Supreme Court and that the district court articulated in the DOMA case and in the Perry case to all Americans in all 50 states.
The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.
We put fear and prejudice on trial, and fear and prejudice lost.
We're now segregating our schools based on economics; we're segregating our schools based on where a child's parents live. And it has the same corrosive effect of destroying people's opportunity as racial segregation did.
Jemu watched his father disappear. He didn't throw the coconut and he didn't cry. Never again would he know love for another human being that wasn't adulterated by another, contradictory emotion.
Everybody wants respect. In their own way, three-year-olds would like respect, and acknowledgment, in their terms.
If you want to connect with people who are in distress and great grief and scared, you need to do it in a certain way. I move kind of slow. I talk kind of slow. I let them know that I respect them.
All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.
We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
Though the human heart may have to pause for rest when climbing the heights of affection it rarely stops on the slippery slope of hatred.
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