Attitudes towards homosexuality

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On Earth, the world population has reached over 7 billion people who belong to over 5000 ethnicities. With over 7 billion people, you would think there are some major differences in us all, but the most prominent difference is our skin color. With the difference in skin color has come prejudice towards certain ethnic or racial minorities and from that has stemmed discrimination. Take the civil rights movement of the 1960’s for example. Even after 50 years and with the election of President Barack Obama, African Americans still feel underrepresented and discriminated against. Another example is the Women’s Rights Movement which started in 1840 and is still prominent today. Just over a year ago a ban was finally lifted which kept women from fighting in combat over-seas. And still today, women are oppressed in the workforce due to the glass ceiling, an invisible barrier that blocks the promotion of a qualified individual in a work environment because of the individual’s gender, race, or ethnicity. A further example and the one that serves as the basis to this paper is the Stonewall riots, the beginning of the LGBT movement and societies view towards homosexuality since then. “This Gay Liberation movement, initiated by the Stonewall Riots in New York, expressed the twin intentions of discrediting psychiatric and medical models of homosexuality, and of attempting a large-scale transformation of society” (Downing, 2011). By the mid-1970s, the LGBT movement helped to establish gay identity as a legitimate minority group – the gay community.
Frequently, people encounter situations in their environment or meet people to whom they are not acclimated to. Today, society is very quick to put a label on someone by the way they dre...

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...re central to the agenda. The conference underlined the fact that the rights of gays had become one of the most vexed and challenging issues facing contemporary Christianity” (Hunt, 2009). Traditionalists alongside the world’s more prominent religions generally disapprove of homosexuality and often cite religious arguments to support their views. Since 2003, the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church have opened their doors to gay bishops and clergy, even as most other denominations keep their teaching against homosexual behavior intact. In relation, overall support for same-sex marriage has jumped to 53 percent in 2013. During this time, same-sex marriage became legal in 17 states and the District of Columbia. Also, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, that restricted federal recognition of legally wed gay couples.

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