@2018 Jan Miller Corran
It’s been many months since I’ve written an article for Epochalips. Between releasing my new film SNAPSHOTS and the daily drip drip drip of global tragedies, I’ve been pre-occupied. But last night it hit me. The news is reporting ad nauseam on the hair style of the President, the poor shoe choice of the first lady, and the perpetual sound bites that are chipping away at civility. What we aren’t hearing is what is really going on in the world that hits us very close to home. Rights. We fought for them. We won. Then we found out that they can easily be bastardized or completely eliminated. The LGBTQ community watched as Prop 8 brought us to the point where we can now legally marry. This is huge. Really huge. But… did you want to adopt a child? That right is being stripped away. So sad to think that Congress believes leaving a child in the foster system to go from home to home is so much better than being adopted into a safe, secure and loving family forever. Forty two states legislate adoption discrimination aimed directly at the LGBTQ community.
As we as a nation continue to be riveted to ugly rhetoric on facebook, twitter or instagram, we are missing the realities of what is happening to our rights. I just want to live my life in peace. I won’t bother you and you won’t harass me. Simple request. With hate crimes up 17% since 2017 we need to get very serious about who we have become as a society. Just because you don’t accept homosexuals doesn’t mean you have permission to attack someone who is. Just because someone chooses to love someone of the same sex doesn’t mean you can deny a job, housing, services of all kinds. We thought saying no to baking a wedding cake was as bad as it could get. Literally it was just a bit of frosting on the hate cake. There was a time in America not too long ago when blacks had their own water fountains. There was a time not so long ago that Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered because he was gay. There was a time not so long ago that a majority of LGBTQ people hid in the closet. The #MeToo movement made women brave. It didn’t make them secure.Many ran back to the closet. Hope. Yes there is hope. With over 100 women being elected to Congress my hope in the future has opened that glimmer of a silver lining again. Openly gay and transgender men and woman have been elected throughout America. This is a signal that there are voters who believe in the person and not sexual identification.
We came so far in the past decades. I’m not going back. I’ll continue to speak out and support organizations that fight for us like NCLR, GLAAD, HRC. I’ll continue to make films that tell great stories and weave messages into them. And most of all I will ignore divisive rhetoric and become educated to the legislation that threatens to take our rights away.
Jan Miller Corran, President Three Women in a Box Films
510-292-9283
www.threewomeninabox.com @ThreeWomennaBox
SNAPSHOTS (released)
