It’s a semantic thing — the way I think of certain words don’t reflect what society seems to want me to think of them. But, I am sincere in the way I understand those words.

To explain:

I would agree with the words you’ve said — personally, I think ‘LGBT rights’ is a strange and unnecessary concept. But that is because in my mind, ‘rights’ is a set of fundamental guidelines, rules and dues that are bestowed on all persons. Maybe they differ between cultures, but they are the baseline for what a society offers to its people. Rights are everyone’s rights. That rights are everyone’s is part of what makes a right a right, in my mind.

I think categorical privileges differ from rights. Certain groups of people — just for example: politicians, police, women, children — have different privileges — respectively: to run for office, to uphold the law with force, to birth a child, to receive leniency from the law. These privileges are defined by the office or ability of the people they belong to, but these privileges only mean anything at all when there are basic rights in place. For example, a woman’s privilege to give birth to a child only means anything if everyone has certain rights (e.g.: to make decisions about one’s body, one’s partner, one’s sexual habits, one’s orientation, and of course, whether one wants to birth a child, etc.).

So I guess from my perspective, it isn’t a question of LGBT rights or women’s rights. Rights are always everyone’s rights. The question is why the owners of the country have taken certain rights, decided to call them privileges, and then bestow them on some people and not others.

EDIT: And I liked the quote from my previous reblog for this reason. It illustrates that what’s going on isn’t that a group of people are asking for things that they do not have — it is that some decision makers have decided to steal from certain groups things that everyone, by nature of being alive, already ought to have has.