Tolerance

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we are about to land at Guernsey Airport so please set your watches back fifteen years”.
 
It’s an old joke and barely still relevant.
 
I mean, who wears a watch these days?
 
We do however seem to drag behind the times in a lot of ways which isn’t always a bad thing. At least it gives us a chance to see where others go wrong before we rush headlong towards copying them.
 
Take Gay Rights for instance.
 
Here the world seems deeply divided, with some countries or states promoting or allowing gay marriage whilst others ban and criminalise the very thought of love between two of the same sex.
 
It wasn’t so long ago here that homosexuality was the love that dare not speak its name and only in 2010 did Guernsey lower the age of consent to match that for heterosexual couples.
 
Why is there such a fuss about a person’s sexuality?
 
Does it make them any less of a person or a better individual?
 
Is being gay catching?
 
Would you know if you’re standing next to one in the shopping queue?
 
Why does it matter?
 
There still seems to be a residual fear that homosexuality will creep across this Island and end up infecting all of us. Either that or we’ll all be attacked in our beds by raging queens.
 
It isn’t going to happen.
 
Locals and other residents alike have already come out of the closet and the sky hasn’t collapsed on us all. It’s just made a few individuals a bit more happier that they don’t have to live a lie any longer.
 
Of course it has also made a few different individuals more angry as, seemingly in their minds, homosexuals are not put on this earth to be happy.
 
This can be called all sorts of things but intolerance is probably a word which can cover it.
 
Intolerance that these people can have the same rights and breath the same air as normal decent people.
 
It obviously makes sense to them but sounds daft to me.
 
Let’s change the context slightly and see if it still makes any sense.
 
Being left handed is wrong.
 
People should all be right handed and made to be right handed.
 
Lefties shouldn’t have the same rights as normal people.
 
Watch yourself, she’s a leftie.
 
Keep them away from children, they might turn them into lefties.
 
Sounds stupid doesn’t it?
 
Being left handed is something you are born with, like having blue eyes or being ginger.
 
Or being gay.
 
You can be forced to spend the whole of your life holding a pen in your right hand but you are still left handed. Someone suddenly throws a ball at you and you’ll instinctively catch it with your left hand because that’s the way you’re wired.
 
That’s all that being left handed means.
 
It doesn’t make you a second class citizen or less, or more, of a person. It’s just the way you are.
 
And that’s what being gay should mean.
 
It’s just the way you are and the rest of the world just keeps on going as it always does and the bills still need paying and you still hate having to get up early in the morning to go to work.
 
Nobody worries about or comments on someone being left handed so why can’t we do the same for gays?
 
If two people love each other enough to make a long term commitment then why can’t Guernsey allow that to happen legally and disregard their sexuality?
 
Maybe it’s time we wound things up a bit and moved those watch hands forward a decade or so.