Discrimination or inconvenience?

So this blog represents my last journal entry for my nonviolence class. This post deserves some background before I begin. At Juniata a few weeks ago some students approached the student senate about creating a permanent seat for the LGBT community. We preach diversity and inclusion on campus, so I thought this would be a no brainer. To get a permanent seat the senate needed to approve the proposal and send the issue to the student body for a vote. However, the senate failed to approve the measure because of varying arguments, the first of them being, “well then any minority can request a seat.” How horrible of a day would that be when every minority group on campus would have voice!!! (Sorry for the sarcasm.) I think that it is more a problem of wanting to maintain the status quo more than anything else. People are afraid of change.

The LGBT community could not be silenced. To get another senate vote required the signatures of 100 students. The LGBT community and supporters got over 400! LGBT and friends raised awareness about the issue and started a campus wide discussion. The Senate overturned their previous vote and brought the issue to the student body, where they needed a majority. They designed a campaign to raise the appropriate number of votes to get a seat.

This background brings us to the point of this post. I was eating dinner last week and I got in a discussion about this with on of my friends. He made the argument that I stated earlier, that we can’t do allow them to get a seat because it sets a precedence. He continued, “with this argument, men should have a seat on the senate because they are a minority.” Man, when I heard this, and he was being dead serious, I was floored. How can we have come so far, yet people still do not understand what it means to be a minority. Men are well represented on the student senate. They don’t need to guarantee a permanent seat. Men are not ostracized from society. Men are not in danger of loosing rights and discrimination.

Our conversation progressed to a bathroom in the Physics wing. The men’s restroom was converted to a unisex bathroom to accommodate a transgender physics student. My friend told us that he did not understand why he the bathroom needed to be converted. He said that with the unisex bathroom, he felt compelled to lock the door to prevent anyone from walking in on him. He said, “I don’t understand why I should be inconvenienced.” Inconvenienced? What is the difference between this line of thought and discrimination? To me, when a person wants to be able to do something that would make them equal to everyone else and is unable to do that, it is discrimination. If a person refuses to allow this to happen because of change of the status quo, or inconvenience, that is discrimination. Yes it may inconvenience my friend, but his beliefs represent a form of discrimination. It is these beliefs that I hope can be changed by nonviolence. A recurring them of this blog occurs yet again: it is hard to change these core values. But, change needs to occur slowly and nonviolence is the vehicle for this to occur.