Since Jewell, Tia, and Katie are all writing blogs on this, I thought that I might as well add in my opinion, because it's the day before the AP Language test and I'm at home sick whoo o/

I have a classmate who used to be bullied for being gay, and a friend who's bullied even now for being bi. His classmates call him a girl, so much that he starts thinking of himself as actually a girl, and it makes me so angry every time I hear about that because that's just not right. First of all, because you don't mock people for their ual orientation, and second of all, I'm slightly pissed that apparently "being a girl" is bad - how ist is that?

At my school, we're actually pretty accepting of all ual orientations, which I'm glad for (we have teachers who are openly gay, too, and our state has legalized gay marriage along with why), but that's not the case for the rest of the country. Do you know what makes me the angriest? When I see all those news articles about people in churches protesting at the funerals of soldiers just because they were gay - excuse me, but seriously? What is your problem? You have your own views, yes, but what right do you have to intrude on someone's funeral, someone who has served his or her country - what right do you have to disrupt that? It's so...low. Cruel. Base. I can't even find the words to describe how horrified I am by it.

I accept people for their ual orientation, but I'm not someone who tries to press it upon everyone. You're allowed to have your own views. Maybe you grew up learning that homouality was something like a taboo. Maybe that's what you believe. I can't force people to change their views on that, because really, there is no right and wrong. It's what society accepts, and your own personal beliefs.

But just because you have your own opinion doesn't mean you can dehumanize others. Just because you believe in something doesn't give you the permission to bully and mock, to hurt and tear down the lives of others. Just because you don't support some people doesn't mean you can inflict harsh words and violence against them.

That's just wrong. Is humanity really that cruel? Isn't the word "humanity" itself supposed to mean the emotions we have, the caring side of us? Then why - and I'm still surprised by this - why can we be such inhumane, destructive beings?

Which leads to my next point - are we really defined by our uality?

It's like people recoil in horror at the term "gay" or "lesbian" or "biual" or "transgender," and there are other terms I don't see very often - "bicurious," "straight-leaning bi," "aual," etc. It's like your uality determines what type of person you are - and it really doesn't. I mean, well, yeah, it determines your uality and your identity, and all that, but your character? Whether you are deemed a "good" or "bad" person? I don't see what connection there is between what gender you like or want to be and how kind you are, to put in rather simple terms.

In addition, people tend to put labels and categorize. There are so many types of uality. If you asked me how straight I was on a scale of zero to ten, I'd tell you nine. I'm mostly straight, and I don't like girls in that way, but at the same time, it's not like I'm completely straight and completey unaware of how attractive other girls might be to me. That doesn't mean I'm biual or bicurious, or even straight-leaning bi. I'm categorized as straight, but I don't meet that perfectly. And so it is with everyone else, which leads to the question of whether uality really is something to be something so controversial and defining in terms of discrimination and acceptance?

As I said before, I don't think there's really any "right" or "wrong" for this subject, other than the fact that I believe dehumanizing others and discriminating them is absolutely wrong, but this is some food for thought. And now I feel like I have completely gone randomly around in circles because I'm typing this up while studying for AP language and AP biology and watching variety shows at the same time (studying skills are A++++) so I think I will just leave it at this before I start spouting out random nonsense about epinephrine and cAMP and protein kinases yes okay thank you for reading my mini rant if you've gotten this far ^^