It Needs To Be Said

Wow, look at me, two posts in one day and one is directly after the other... What can I say? I've been inspired. :)

I shall preface this by saying that a good friend of mine recently came out. I love her and I'm proud of her and all of those sentimental clichés that people say when someone they know comes out (and I do love her and I am proud of her, but they are overused.) But it got me thinking about love, and relationships and sexuality. I am a wholehearted supporter of LGBTQ rights and marriage equality, I have always been.

I have two uncles who are gay, so as a child, I was always brought up being aware that the 'traditional' idea of a relationship between a man and a woman being the only sort to exist was not true at all. I thank my mother for bringing me up and teaching me to be accepting and open. I was pretty outraged when I learned that some parents don't want their children to know that some people are gay. To me, that's on the same level as forbidding children to watch the news. Not letting your children watch the news is ridiculous - you want to protect then from things like death and crime that appear on our TV screens all too frequently, but what you're really doing in bringing them up in a perfect fantasy world. They will be exposed to bad things sooner or later, inevitably, so why not just let them know about it from a young age? I always watched the news in the morning when I was young, and I'm in no way violent now, at the age of fifteen.
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Bringing your child up unaware of different sexualities is the same thing. Ignorance breeds fear breeds hate, and if there's one thing we don't need more of in this world, it's hate. Opposing same-sex marriage is one thing; pretending it doesn't exist is another matter entirely. The former I will accept, even if I totally disagree. The latter will enrage me. Because the truth is, like war and abortion and famine, homosexuality is very real. (War and famine are not the best examples, as they're pretty much considered universal evils, but I couldn't think of anything else)

We are living in a society where being LGBTQ is becoming less controversial and more and more accepted.  I strongly believe that we could be the generation that will change things. I'm convinced that the vast majority of people despise racism, which was common until fairly recently. If our attitude towards racial minorities and interracial relationships changed so quickly, what do you think will happen to our views on LGBTQ?
And a final question: We despise racism, and look back on white supremacy as a horrific belief held by ignorant people. In twenty years, how will we look back on homophobia?