They are your rights, assert them

"We owe it to ourselves to bring about a cultural change that values our differences"

Those of us who are going to vote wonder:

¿What do POLITICAL CANDIDATES propose on this issue?

Lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals and transvestites face prejudice, discrimination and violent messages on a daily basis, which has a negative impact on their full development as people and citizens. Those whose loves, passions and affections exist outside of the heterosexual norm, have had a hard time being just the way they are and have had to suffer discrimination, double lives, secrecy and invisibility. They have been denied full citizenship through limitations to the exercise of human rights that are inherent in them like they are in everybody.

Although we are in the last couple of years of the first decade of the XXI century, sexuality is still a taboo, and homosexual sexuality even more so. Experiencing loneliness, fear of ostracism and lack of support from their families is a common denominator among those departing from the heterosexual norm. Predominating images on homosexual sexuality range from the negative (something sinful, dirty, depraved, abusive) to the ludicrous (something it’s acceptable to make fun of).

They are characterized by society as sick, abnormal people, transgressors of the social order (dangerous), guilty of a deviation, they are despised and made fun of, which results in sexual, physical, psychological, economic and/or legal violence. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) stopped considering homosexuality as a mental disorder long ago. This step forward is mainly due to the fact that it has been proven that studies that condemned homosexuality or classified it as a deviation were based on social prejudice and on the natural psychological trouble experienced by homosexuals in social environments that were very intolerant towards them. Homophobia, on the contrary, is classified as a pathology.

The Uruguayan society owes itself a cultural change aimed at achieving full equality of opportunities and that guarantees the conditions of justice and freedom to enable the development of people pursuant to their potentials, desires, aspirations, diverse sets of values and various life projects. A cultural change that values differences as opportunities and not as weaknesses or problems.

We want a Uruguay that in stead of protecting and defending a rigid, hierarchical, sexist, misogynous social order that is phobic to all differences, benefits from individual freedoms and promotes collective conscience, based on responsible decisions and on the peaceful coexistence of the various sets of values.