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2006 Youth Activist Scholarship -- Erik Meinhardt

Document Date: May 5, 2006

Erik Meinhardt is graduating from Berea High School near Cleveland, Ohio. He was a summer intern at the ACLU of Ohio in 2005, where he distinguished himself as a natural leader and helped to plan the statewide Students as Citizens Conference. Since the summer, Erik has been a regular presence at the ACLU of Ohio, in addition to his remarkable achievements as a LGBT activist at his high school. Erik also participates in Junior State of America in national mock-Congress events, is a member of his high school speech and debate team and several other organizations.

Following are excerpts from Erik’s scholarship essay.

As a gay youth, I have faced discrimination and isolation from family, peers, and other adults because of my sexuality. Before I took an active role in organizing a group in my school that supported the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, this discrimination came at me overtly. People teased me verbally and slurred me for my failure to conform to the socially expected role of an ultra-masculine, dominant, sport-loving, emotion-hating, alpha male. In elementary school, I was bullied daily on the walk home from school. More recently, in high school, I have had potted flowers thrown at me, and was sexually harassed by a homophobic bully at a public library.

Many of the arguments against homosexuality cited scripture as means for denying equal rights under the law. I never knew at this point, my freshman year, that any kind of inequality existed in America. Like my peers, my suburban upbringing taught me that we lived in the land of the free, that slavery, sexism, injustice and oppression all happened at a time that seemed far removed. I believed that only Third World nations experienced problems with inequality today. Immediately after recovering from the shock of this epiphany, I had another one: if opponents to homosexuality used scripture to affirm their contentions, then it would mean that the government violated the separation of church and state.

Having a strong sense of justice, I needed to see something done to rectify the problem of unequal rights for the LGBT community in this supposed “land of the free.” As a healthy, out-of-the-closet gay youth with good grades, big dreams, and good leadership skills, 1 felt obligated to take initiative. I, along with two other students at Berea High School, created a gay-straight alliance to remedy the problems we saw in our school and community.

The group serves as an advocate for policy change, a means of educating the community about LGBT issues, and as a support group for LGBT students. During our first year of existence, we held a forum on religion and a second on harassment and bullying. Both forums gathered students from neighboring community’s gay-straight alliances, teachers, and students. These forums allowed all who attended an opportunity to open their minds and discuss the issues in the open. Last year, we held a forum on LGBT history, which allowed participants to take an active role in the research and presentation of the information. We also took a more controversial stance and advocated for a change in the anti-harassment policy in our school district to include both sexual orientation and gender identity. Our attempt at this was not met with success despite our elaborate project of documenting all instances of anti-LGBT slurs in the school. The school administration told us that the term “sex” covered sexual orientation and gender identity.

The Day of Silence went more successfully than any previous endeavors we undertook. The first year we held the silent, all day, massive student protest against anti-LGBT discrimination and harassment, we had 70 participants. Last year, over 200 students in our school took part in the protest! We labeled the week “Hate Crime Awareness Week” and had murder victim chalk outlines around school with stories of murdered LGBT victims on them. We even teamed up with the drama club and art department to create live “victims” that went around the school building with make-up on their faces. The psychology and sociology classes even allowed us to present lessons on homosexuality and religion, homosexuality and the law, and human sexual development.

This year we have three goals. First, we want to see the anti-harassment policy changed so that it includes sexual orientation and gender identity. We have begun petitioning on this effort. Second, we are challenging the Department of Defense’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. We are setting up tables next to the military recruiters as they make appearances at our school. Finally, we want to change the non-inclusive, abstinence-only, no sex until marriage sexual education policy to a more inclusive one.

The harassment and discrimination I face has taken on a more covert role. No longer do people beat me up or verbally tease me for my sexuality or my shortfall in masculinity. Now, people attempt to silence me, and silence the organization I run. They hesitantly allow the group to exist and use this makeshift “support” as a compromising tool in negotiating with us. Unfortunately for them, I refuse to compromise my rights and liberties, and I refuse to watch the state deny any persons’ rights and/or liberties guaranteed in the Constitution. After I wrote a letter to my school’s administration about their denial of our rights to free speech and expression, the advisers of my organization resigned. Unable to both stand up for what they believed and still have a successful career, they felt it necessary to collapse under pressure from the controversy surrounding our group. This was one of the worst setbacks we faced. The school administration labeled us as angry and refused to look at the criticisms in a positive light. We still have to fully resolve this issue. The administration has yet to address our grievances.

Leading the organization made me grow as a person, and as a civil libertarian. I learned, most importantly, that the struggle for equal rights and liberties affects many different groups, and that the struggles have commonalities on many levels. I quickly found out that the denial of LGBT rights has a lot to do with the lack of separation between church and state. I realized the true importance of free speech in the spread of knowledge and truth, and that without it; our group’s existence means nothing. I felt the debilitating effects of censorship. I learned that even the advisors of the organization, our closest allies in the school, did not think that youth should take any part in the changing of rules simply because of age. I experienced discrimination and harassment from groups of students who I would have thought would support our cause: Christians, whose ancestors left Europe to flee religious persecution, persecuted my organization. Some members of racial minorities, who experience daily the effects of discrimination, discriminated against the organization and I. With supporters of our cause discriminating against us because of our age, and with groups who traditionally faced persecution persecuting the organization and I, I had to look inward to guarantee that I did not do the same thing. I changed the name of the organization at my school from “Gay-Straight Alliance” to “Student Equal Rights Coalition.” We now serve the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, asexual, auto sexual and ally (LGBTQQIPAAA) community, not just the gays and straights, and not just the LGBT. I now champion the rights of all people.

I have taken this struggle personally, and I do not think I can rest until I see universal justice. This surely will not stop in the future. In the future, I hope to get my law degree, and make a career out of fighting for civil liberties. Eventually, I would like to take the fight internationally, because the rights of women and the LGBT communities does not start or end in the United States.

I have dealt with discrimination and many setbacks in my struggle to make the world a better place. I will continue my life’s mission to work for equality. To conclude, I would like to offer a slight modification to Patrick Henry’s famous “give me liberty or give me death” and render it a summary of my entire life’s philosophy: “Give me death only when there is liberty.”

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