Global Citizen and Your Importance

A global citizen is a person who is in involved in our developing world and contributes to the development of our world, preferably positively. A global citizen should be willing to stand for issues they believe are important and raise awareness of the issue for others to do the same. In the world we live in, we are all global citizens whether we recognize this or not. My reasoning for this is that we all (consciously or subconsciously) care about and advocate for issues we believe are important, whether it's something as small as what's being served in the cafeteria to something as huge as human rights violations. You may not think you're doing much by casually talking to your friends about society's problems, but you may plant ideas in their mind that were never there before. You may not think it's important enough to advocate the world about it, but they might.

You may be asking yourself what you have to do with any of this, and that's a fair enough question honestly. Take my blog topic for example: sexual identities. By reading my blog (or learning information on this subject through other sources) you can educate yourself and eventually educate others on this subject. This could maybe spark some interest in their minds and cause them to do something great for the contribution to putting a stop to the  discrimination of lgbtqiap individuals. In other words, by subconsciously spreading awareness on a subject, you could be indirectly changing the world. Express your opinion (as long as it does not hurt anyone) because you never know what could come out of it.

History

There has been many ups and downs since the beginning of time when it comes to LGBTQIAP people. Yes, since the beginning of time itself there are known instances of gay couples. For example let's go back all the way to 5000 BCE: there has been rock art discovered that portrays homosexual male couples. Fast forward to approximately 1700 BCE: female figures have been interpreted into domestic relations. In 7th century BCE are the first known instances of  illegality of same- sex marriages in Greece, but life long partnerships were extremely common.
For the sake of this post I will be skipping history between then and 1933, which is the year which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party began their rise. Between then and 1945, up to 15 000 homosexuals were sent to Nazi concentration camps and approximately 9 000 of them passed away there. It was not until 2002 that the German government appologized o the gay community.
In 1994, LGBT history month was set to February.
The Netherlands were first country to legally allow smae-sex marriage (2001) and the first same-sex marriage happened on April 1, 2001. (Canada was the fourth country to legalize same-sex marriage, this happened in 2005.) As of today, eightteen countries allow same-sex marriage.

       (Countries coloured in navy blue have legalized 

same-sex marriage as of 2014)