So of course you’ve probably heard about the California Supreme Court ruling from Thursday that everyone’s going wild about. George Takei, Ellen deGeneres, and multiple others are finally taking the chance to test the murky, barely-tred waters of same-sex marriage in California.
However, even though this latest twist in a long battle to secure same-sex nuptial rights in a state that is already well-stereotyped as a bastion of LGBTdom is far from over, I’d like to take a look at three up-and-coming civil rights movements that will probably make waves later in the 20th century:
- Fetish subcultural rights (and this might as well include civil rights for the furry subculture)
- Autism rights and neurodiversity
- Inter-Species rights
The first one should be obvious, considering that alot of people still look upon homosexuality or transgenderism as sexual fetishes that can be shrugged off or successfully repressed from manifestation like a drug addiction rather than as sexual identities that are just as valid as ethnoracial or religious identities that are given far more credence in the political spectrum. The problem is that those who identify with a particular fetish or fetish subculture are not as easily visible or identifiable in public as are those who espouse a religion (hijabs and yarmulkas), an ethnicity or race (don’t want to go there), or an obvious sexual orientation (don’t want to go there either); most fetishes are explored in either closed rooms, convention halls or internet forums and chat rooms.
Autism rights and neurodiversity, on the other hand, is different from other, more mainstream disability rights movements: instead of just accomodation and acceptance, the autism rights movement demands the de-classification of autism and Asperger’s as afflictions or mental disorders in favor of a re-recognition of the autistic spectrum as a merely “different” “natural” re-wiring of the brain’s synapses; it also advocates for the development of a distinct “autistic culture”. This stance has resulted, unfortunately, in the stereotyping of the autistic rights movement as an anti-psychiatry movement, which places it in the same boat as the infamous Church of Scientology.
Finally, the great debate of how us “highly-developed” humans must relate with the lowly animals that reside outside the periphery of human understanding. The talk of interspecies relations is almost unversally censored in order to exclude any serious, non-condemnatory mention of interspecies sexual relations, while any discussion of interspecies communication is laughed at or hosted simply for novelty purposes. But the fact that we homo sapiens only understand the communication of a paltry few other species at pre-school level, I think, keeps us from effectively reaching out to them in full-breadth initiatives that would allow us to incorporate them and their concerns into human society at levels above the classes of simple “pets” and “zoo animals”; as we continue with the building of facilities and technological contraptions to accomodate the continuous population growth that threatens natural, ecological and botanical systems in various parts of the planet, I think that advocacy for the incorporation of other species into our society’s infrastructures at humane, mutually-respectful levels will increase. To accomplish this, the creation of mutual communication enablements between species is priority #1.
Anyway, I think that these three rights movements will come to gain the public attention later on in the 21st century, primarily because they will force a public reappraisal of how we identify ourselves and how we think about and view the world around us, and those who dwell in it.
