Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless - until they aren't.
Amy Waldman
The thematically related 'Boys Don't Cry' and 'Brokeback Mountain' reinforced the narrative that gays like Mr. Shepard are regularly isolated for cruel and unusual attacks.
Andrew Breitbart
Gays are the molecular opposites of blacks.
Ann Coulter
I have huge fans. Gays love me.
It's not a question of being out of touch or traditional. It's a question of wanting to preserve marriage as uniquely between a man and a woman. Gays get full civil rights with civil partnerships anyway.
Ann Widdecombe
I opposed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. It should be repealed and I will vote for its repeal on the Senate floor. I will also oppose any proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban gays and lesbians from marrying.
Barack Obama
I think what you're seeing is a profound recognition on the part of the American people that gays and lesbians and transgender persons are our brothers, our sisters, our children, our cousins, our friends, our co-workers, and that they've got to be treated like every other American. And I think that principle will win out.
What I believe is that marriage is between a man and a woman, but what I also believe is that we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship that afford them visitations to hospitals, that allow them to be, to transfer property between partners, to make certain that they're not discriminated on the job.
If we are endowed by our Creator with rights, then why shouldn't those be attainable by gays and lesbians?
Bill Nelson
Lesbians and gays... they still have to fight, even inside. It's not that simple, even if they seem to be accepted.
Catherine Deneuve
Being a teenager, a gay teenager, in such a small village is not that much fun. I am part of the gay community and most gays have a similar story to mine.
Conchita Wurst
Wherever there was injustice, war, discrimination against women, gays and the disadvantaged, I did my best to show up and exert moral persuasion.
Coretta Scott King
I have seen too many of my male friends - no matter whether they're on the football field or inside a church - bash gays and then revel in their machismo or piety.
Cory Booker
The disgust and latent hostility I felt toward gays were subcategories of hatred, plain and simple.
I don't think it's the responsibility of gays and lesbians to reinvent the family.
Dan Savage
Where gays and lesbians are the best organized and most concentrated in numbers are states that President Clinton must carry in order to be reelected in 1996. Among the states are California, New York, Michigan, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Illinois.
David Mixner
I do have a lot of gays in my family now, but some will never come out.
Dolly Parton
Originally I was opposed to gay assimilation and targeted gay marriage as just another effort on the part of gays to resemble their straight neighbours.
Edmund White
If bigots oppose gay marriage so vehemently, it must be because marriage is a defining institution for them; gays will never be fully accepted until they can marry and adopt, like anyone else.
The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier.
I do probably come down a little hard on a group of people I call the 'blue chip gays.' I mean people who have managed to become very, very famous and are still very famous partly through staying in the closet, like Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and others.
AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s.
Originally, I was against gay marriage because I was opposed to all marriage, being an old-fashioned gay bohemian. The straight people I knew in the sixties were very much opposed to it. I was, too, and it was never a possibility for gays, but when I saw how opposed the Religious Right was to it, I thought it a fight worth fighting.
I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.
Early on, after gay liberation, there was an almost Stalinist pressure from gay critics and even gay readers to write about positive role models. We were never supposed to write negative things about gays, or else we were seen as collaborating with the enemy.
First, I was opposed to gay marriage because it seemed like one more way that gays were wanting to assimilate. When I realized the Christian right was so opposed to it, as well as tyrannical governments in Africa and Russia, I thought, 'It must be a good thing to fight for.'
Gays and lesbians are sick people. It's definitely a disease. They haven't invented a cure for it yet, but I hope they will.
My readers are surprisingly mixed. I have conservative readers - for instance, women with headscarves - but also many liberal, leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, and secularist readers. Next to those are mystics, agnostics, Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Sunnis, gays, housewives, and businesswomen.
First, I used some of my own experiences and observations from attending a public high school. Secondly, I joined in some Internet chat rooms for gays and lesbians.
Doing a concert, I look at a room full of different people, and I see you've got Muslims, you've got Jews, you've got Christians, you've got gays, you've got straights, you've got blacks, you've got whites. I think, 'How can I unite these people through song?'
The hip hop industry is most likely owned by gays. I happen to think there's a gay mafia in hip hop. Not rappers - the editorial presidents of magazines, the PDs at radio stations, the people who give you awards at award shows.
What people love about Santorum is he is who is he. He speaks his words. He loves God. He loves his country, and he loves gays.
I plan to see St. Louis as a global competitor. As an international trade hub, as an incubator of new companies, as a place of culture and the arts, as a magnet for immigrants, for entrepreneurs, for animal lovers, and for gays, as a city of parks and trails, and as the sort of place that figures in young people's dreams.
Gay rights is just a matter of time. Look at the polls. Worrying about gay marriage, let alone gay civil unions or gay employment rights, is a middle-age issue. Young people just can't see the problem. At worst, gays are going to win this one just by waiting until the opposition dies off.
Well, it'd certainly be fascinating if we discovered that gays were better at being married than heterosexuals are. Talk about irony.
In Indiana, gays and lesbians can be fired from their jobs with impunity, and in Arkansas, it's the same thing. We need those protective laws to truly have an equal society.
Coming out to gays is a way of affirming sanity and self-worth.
Many people secretly think that gays are a lot happier than they are, and want to punish them.
At RightNow, we employed gays, and we ran a complete meritocracy.
It's definitely my responsibility not to stereotype any character, but especially a gay character because of the misperceptions people still have about gays.
When a politician like Marco Rubio is willing to sacrifice his career defining immigration reform legislation solely to insure that gays and lesbians are denied equal protection under the law, we have to admit that we're under attack. This is not pragmatic politics at work. These are the policies of bias, exclusion and unfairness.
America is off-the-hook gay. I will not go all Ann Coulter on you and say, 'Our gays are better than their gays,' but as far as countries go, we are in-your-face gay.
I think people feel threatened by homosexuality. The problem isn't about gay people, the problem is about the attitude towards gay people. People think that all gays are Hannibal Lecters. But gay people are sons and daughters, politicians and doctors, American heroes and daughters of American heroes.
There are gays and lesbians in every country, so there should be no discrimination against them just because of their destiny.
Along with racial equality and the late bloom of women's rights, future generations will have to explain how, in the past, gays were misunderstood and publicly humiliated for loving each other, and, eventually, how they stood together and conquered stupidity and hypocritical hatred, and fought their way out of marginalization.
When he emerged Lou Dobbs the populist, he was so hard to peg. A mishmash of contradictions: anti-outsourcing, anti-globalization, pro-international-trade, pro-free-enterprise, anti-corporatism, pro-choice, pro-Second Amendment, pro-gay-marriage, pro-gays-serving-openly-in-the-military, pro-military, anti-war-in-Iraq-and-Afghanistan.
I've skewered whites, blacks, Hispanics, Christians, Jews, Muslims, gays, straights, rednecks, addicts, the elderly, and my wife. As a standup comic, it is my job to make sure the majority of people laugh, and I believe that comedy is the last true form of free speech.
The death of anti-gay hate speech is no doubt being hastened by the head-spinning speed with which gays as a group - to say nothing of gay marriage - are becoming an unremarkable and even quite traditional parts of American life.
Immigration is the most difficult issue I've ever dealt with, and I've dealt with some tough issues: drones, gays in the military, WikiLeaks, Guantanamo. But immigration is hardest because there are so few people willing to talk and build consensus. Everybody's firmly made up their mind. It's a polarized issue.
I think they should let gays in the military because we are the United States of America. And if a gay person wants to serve his or her country, why should they not be allowed to?
