[QUOTE="Laihendi"]
I'll clarify my position. I think civil rights activists focusing on specific rights for specific groups of people should instead be advocating universal freedom for everyone. What many do not seem to realize is that every social injustice is the result of a lack of freedom. In a free society there would be no oppressive laws against anyone, and concepts such as "LGBT rights" and "women's rights" would not even be relevant. Many people like to make a fuss about oppressive laws targeted at the LGBT community, but then somehow don't care about the fact that almost every human on Earth is the target of oppressive laws by oppressive governments (US included).
ghoklebutter
Discrimination against LGBT people is mostly a result of anti-LGBT attitudes in society, and their lack of freedom arises from those attitudes. For instance, it would be disingenuous to say that the religious right in the USA oppose gay marriage only because they don't want gay people to have freedom; in reality, they oppose gay marriage because they think that homosexuality is evil, unnatural, etc. You see, their desire to restrict the freedom of LGBT people in this case is precisely a result of anti-LGBT attitudes.
To make my point clearer, here's an analogy: let's say that there is a white man and a black man hurling racial insults at each other, and I'm supposed to intervene before they start beating each other up. Clearly, racism implies a lack of respect, but I can't use abstraction to solve the problem. In other words, if I shout "Violence is bad!" while ignoring the racial element of that confrontation, I'm not addressing the actual root of the problem: racism. So in that case, I should make it clear that racism - especially racial violence - is bad. Of course, it's likely that they won't give a sh!t about what I say, but at least my attempt would be much more reasonable than merely calling them out on being mutually disrespectful in the most abstract sense possible.
And it makes sense to believe that women's rights, LGBT rights, etc. probably wouldn't be discussed in a truly free society. However, in the society you speak of, people will stop talking about liberating minorities from oppression only because those minorities no longer face systemic oppression.
Finally, the reason people have created these separate movements is that they are devoted to solving specific problems that have unique roots. If you care only about generalized social struggle, then you necessarily ignore the dynamics of oppression inherent in the oppression particular minorities face. Just like sexism is not exactly the same as racism, so homophobia is not exactly the same as all other forms of discrimination. And ignoring that fact can only be inimical to social struggle.
If the government could not legally interfere with our personal lives, it wouldn't matter how homophobic, racist, sexist, or whatever else the lawmakers/lawenforcers were. They would not be legally capable of oppressing anyone for any reason. I do think it's important to educate people about what it means to be homosexual, transgender, or whatever else, in order to create a less hostile environment. However, as a political movement the broader point is being overlooked, which is that the government doesn't have the right to oppress anyone for any reason.
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