Is It OK to be gay at work

Lets start by saying I have a lot of homosexual friends, my best friend actually is gay, and I feel very strongly about this subject. Now that, that is out of the way I can start to talk about this. So I was sitting in SIAST, yesterday with my mom (who is going back to school! I am so proud of her, but i will blog about that later). We were waiting for her appointment to start and I noticed this picture on the cover on a job posting magazine. It was three little like stick people, and then one stick person in a flower covered shirt, and pink tie. They were all male stick people, and the last one was well obviously suppose to be the homosexual one. This caught my attention because, this is a professional magazine and they just stereotyped the gay population into a stick man wearing bright colours and flowers. I have met many gay men, and hang out with a lot of them, and I have never ever seen them wearing bright colours and flowers. So, with that graceful start, I decided to read the article. It began very well actually, discussing the difficulty of being able to say either "No, it is not okay, or Yes, it is okay". One part of this article that I found especially well written was this piece

"At the time of writing this article, a federal US judge deemed 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' unconstitutional, ordering an injunction stopping the enforcement of the policy; a policy which the former US soldier pointed out directly conflicts with the Honour Code soldiers are taught at military academy: don’t lie. ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ forces you to lie, he said in an interview, and “hiding and lying aren’t army values.” President Obama, also lifted that ban. Made me (for once) pretty interested in what was going on in the United States. I have been sitting here wondering, if homosexuals are allowed to fight for their country, why now are we still deciding if they are aloud to be gay at work. Especially a school setting, what then? I know many homophobic parents and I am sad to say that I am sure if they found out the teacher at school who was teaching their child was gay, they would ask to have that teacher removed from the school. Even in the 21st century this is still happening. I want you to read this article for yourself, and then comment on what you think. Because frankly even as proud of my gay best friend as I am, I don't know if I would want him to put himself at risk by letting his students, and then their families to know he is gay.          

should we vote?

we an election coming up my parents have been constantly asking me if I will vote. This is my first year being eligible to even vote, and frankly I thought it would be a lot more exciting then this. Even when I was younger during election time, I never understood why candidates feel the need to personally attack the opposing team instead of taking all that time and money and actually making an ad about what they are going to do for my city, province and or country. I keep telling my mom I am just going to vote for the Green Party, she doesn't like that idea very much. A friend of mine told me "if you don't vote for liberal or conservative, you're pretty much wasting your vote", why is that? Because from what I have seen so far, the Green Party is one of the only parties who actually tell me what they want to do if they get elected into power. I've decided that if I am infact going to vote, I want to be highly educated on who exactly I am voting for, and what exactly happens then if they win. I read this article in TIME and I know it's for the States, but I thought it was really interesting that one state has picked the winner 25 out of 26 times in the States. If us as newly 18 and 19 year olds vote, will it really infact change anything? http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1708570,00.html go to this link, and read this article, decide for yourself if it really is a waste of time voting, or if it is "the year of the youth vote".