Pride

Recapping the past week: I've been running errands, spent time with family and friends (not enough of them), studied (not enough of that either), part-took in a friends photo project, and as I had wanted too for many years now: I attended Stockholm Pride Parade 2011, both watching it with sister and friends as well as joining in and walking in it, albeight not for a very long stretch.

The parade was amazing, with so many walking for their equal rights, and so many to support them. Proud parents and children (this was one of the most beautiful parts), so many happy, dressed up people. It's wonderful that Pride is such a big thing in Sweden, and at the same time, so tragic that the most basic of human right; the right to your own body and sexuality, as well as your conscious decision of who you are together with (in and outside the bedroom) are denied so many people. I hope that for each year, we march forward not only on the streets but in our acceptance as well.

The fact that so many out there make it their buisness to deny others the right to love someone else, based on something as ridiculous as the gender of their choice partner, is beyond me. No actually, it disgusts me.
How can it possibly be anyones right to judge others choice in partner? This choice is made based the joint decision of two individuals, in love and hoping to share a healthy and happy life together. Yet they keep struggeling, fighting for a everyday existance were they can kiss eachother on the street without others recoiling, where they can adopt without others blaiming them for destroying childrens lives, were they can donate blood, go to the damn bank and get the same loans based on the same sets of requirements demanded of straight customers. And this is in Sweden, that often prides itself for being "the most equal country in the world", which honestly, mostly just means: "We're a couple of steps ahead of most of you other nations, and are obtuesly using this as an excuse to not keep trying to improve".

The thing is, there are plenty of straight couples out there, whose relationship is shit. The fighting couples, the cheating couples, the jealous and destructive couples. Yet, noone is banning them from keeping at it, from trying to get it right. Or even worse, the ones not trying to change: couple that abuse eachother, people who hurt their children - they're never actually scrutinezed as a potential representative for everyone with the same sexual preferance as themselves.
Statistically, most couples are straight and therefore, more fucked up, horrible, monstrous abusers and rapists in relationships are also straight. Yet, they don't represent all straight people. A man who's gay, is inevitably denied adopting rights on the basis that he will "turn his kids gay", as if that is on par with some asshole wife-beating drunk, who's going to pass on his brutality to his kids.

There might also be plenty of gay couple out there that are unhappy for the same reason as straight couples. But no one straight is denied their right to partnership based on the fact that their relationship is lousy. I mean, why shouldn't gay people have the same right to be happy, OR miserable, as everybody else?
They have the same wants and dreams as straights, the same need to laugh and feel like they belong, they work, pay taxes, they are good friends/lovers/relatives as well as really shitty ones, and at the end of the day, they should be able to feel like they are just as much part of this fucked-up, messed-up world as anybody else in it.