GUEST COLUMN: Blue Jeans Day is educational opportunity
My name is Sarah Benanti and I am the co-president of USU’s Pride Alliance. I am writing to inform everyone that Monday is National Freedom to Marry Day. Pride Alliance, an organization for gay, lesbian, transgendered and bisexual students and their friends, will celebrate this event with our third annual “Wear Blue Jeans Day.” Pride Alliance is one of many university organizations across the country that holds “Wear Blue Jeans Day.”
We began hosting the event at USU to help educate students about what it means to be gay and lesbian, and to call attention to the fact that we do not have the right to marry who we love. Students will accuse us of manipulating them into supporting gay and lesbian marriage because everyone wears blue jeans everyday.
This is exactly why the blue jean campaign is effective. Gays and lesbians spend a portion of their lives feeling they have to hide who they are and conform to society’s image of how they should look or act. If people have to think about something as common as whether to wear blue jeans or not, it puts the shoe on the other foot.
Suddenly people as a whole are forced to choose, like gays and lesbians do every day, how they are going to present themselves to the world. Students will have to think about what the way they dress says about who they are. I want to publicize the event so on Monday students will know what is going on and won’t feel they’ve been manipulated.
The issue of gay and lesbians’ right to marry has been a plague on state legislatures for years. Gay and lesbian marriage has yet to be legalized in any of the 50 states, and some states have passed laws against it. In Vermont, gays and lesbians can receive a civil union. This gives gays and lesbians only 300 of the more than 1,000 rights that a civil marriage grants.
No one in the gay/lesbian community actually expects that everyone wearing blue jeans on Monday is making a statement of support. Quite the opposite.
Most people will get dressed with very little thought about what it may mean politically. Though it may be controversial, Pride Alliance is trying to increase public awareness. We are calling for the kind of awareness that says we are not different from anyone else, and being such, we deserve equal rights. We live our lives everyday in blue jeans – just like everyone else on this campus and in this community.