Coming Out

I found this comment from my daily meditation quite meaningful and as tomorrow (yesterday) is National Coming Out day, I thought I would share it and a few more thoughts I had.

Sometimes when I think of the image of the crucifixion, I see Matthew Shepard's broken body on a kind of cross, abandoned outside of town. Both men, Jesus and Matthew, were innocent victims of a society that freely and publicly discriminates against and does violence to those who do not meet its expectations of what is "right." Both men, Jesus and Matthew, suffered to the point of death not because they'd done something horrifically wrong, but because they were different and because of the unwillingness of others to accept them/us as they/we are.
-Keith Phillips, http://www.JesusMCC.org/bestill/

I was reflecting on this insight and began to think about how I have been discriminated against myself and I honestly don't think that discrimination has contributed as much to my current state in life as my own decisions. I was in deed thrown out into the world before I could figure out what being gay meant for my life, but I made the decisions I made on my way to discovery. Now that I know who I am and what purpose I have in life, I simply have to work through the consequences of my previous decisions and go from there.
I cannot say in any way I have faced the kind of discrimination that those who came before me have or that those in certain parts of the world or even the US face, but the little bit I have faced makes me feel for them more deeply as I realize how much more difficult their lives have been/are.