I’m a straight, white, male.

In those three words I could arguably be defined as the “perfect” human being. I could use those three words as a reason to flaunt intolerance and prejucide and as an excuse to push people around and tell them to believe what I believe because it’s the right way of thinking.

But I would never and will never tell anyone how to live their life or campaign against anybody’s own ideals and rights just because they conflict with my own.

I’m straight, but I would never ever stand up for or support a cause in which the rights of a group of people are suppressed. If two men or two women love each other, they have every right to get married and be in love (or be miserable) as any other person in this world. Why? Because it doesn’t affect anybody else. Straight people can still get married, can still have kids, and still live their lives; the only reason a “gay couple” getting married affects them is because they make it affect them by wasting their time complaining about it. I also believe they have every right in this world to adopt a child and give them a home, because there are countless straight couples in this world who don’t deserve to have children or don’t even want their children. I’m not saying every gay couple would be better parents than a straight couple, but if they genuinely want a child and will love it, they have every right to do that over someone who gets pregnant unplanned and then spends the rest of their life neglecting that child.

I’m white, but I would never use race to justify the definition of “differences.” Part of my family is black, the majority of my friends aren’t white, and I have no interest in classifying myself or others. For all the people—especially here in the US—who still use race as justification for what they do, I can only shake my head. News flash: in the world at large, “white” is such a small minority. We are not and have never been a majority. Hell, all the people that cling to this idea of “white America” are ridiculous… it’s like we just forget that the white man came to this country and essentially robbed it from the true, native Americans before subsequently building this country on the backs of other so-called “minorities.” The United States is not a “white man’s nation.” It’s a melting pot for anyone who wants to make a stake in their freedom. And whether or not you approve of Obama as President, the fact that people still use the color of his skin as a reason to argue he shouldn’t be President is ridiculous, considering the fact he was voted in by majority. To say America doesn’t need a black President is to deny the simple fact that the majority of Americans did vote him into office… again, the only reason race is an issue is because people revolve their whole lives around making it an issue.

I’m male, and I don’t care if you have a penis or a vagina or both or you’re transitioning or whatever, so long as you’re a good person. From what I’ve seen and experienced, there are enough people on both sides of the gender coin complaining about the opposite side, and that’s fair enough. What I hate is being labeled “sexist” just because I’m a man by certain women, and women have every right to hate being labeled and stereotype by men. I just wish that the extremists and generalists in both genders could stop putting everyone of the opposite sex under the same umbrella, because it’s not fair. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for several strong female presences growing up, and I wouldn’t change that. I’ve also been screwed over enough by girls/women for it to be so easy to jump onto the sexist bandwagon, but I wouldn’t, because it doesn’t matter—both sexes are full of assholes just as much as both sexes are full of genuinely good people.

People need to step back, contextualize, and re-evaluate how they interact with other people. I don’t care if you’re brown, black, green, gay, worship Satan or you’re such a woman you have two vaginas, so long as you’re a good person. Wasting time on telling other people how to live, what to believe in, or how to act is just that—a waste. Whether you believe in a God or you’re the biggest atheist in the world, you shouldn’t waste the life that you have ahead of you pointing out the differences in other people just to make yourself feel better about yourself for whatever warped reason you have. We have enough issues in this world that keep people who really need help from getting it to be worrying about who can or can’t get married. At the end of the day, when you die and go off to meet God or become reborn as a tree or wither into nothing, wouldn’t it be better to say you were happy with the life you were able to fulfill than the life you wasted telling others how to live their’s? In the end, it doesn’t matter to the life you live if a gay couple got married or that a non-white politician is in office.

In the end, we’re all human, and we all have a choice. Don’t throw away your own choice by doing your best to take away everyone else’s.